Emmanuel Exitu wins the XLIII edition of the Giovanni Comisso Literary Prize – Fiction section. With his novel Di cosa è fatta la speranza, published by Bompiani and inspired by the life of Cicely Saunders, Exitu triumphed during the award ceremony on October 5 at the Teatro Comunale Mario Del Monaco in Treviso, surpassing the other two finalists: Tiziano Scarpa with The Truth and the Pen (Einaudi) and Marco Cavalli with The Man of the Encyclopedia (Neri Pozza). In the biography section, the first prize went to Adelaida by Adrian Bravi (Nutrimenti).
The under 35 section of the prize was awarded to Sonia Aggio with the novel In the Emperor’s Room (Fazi), while the career award for Venetian writers went to Patrizia Valduga.
The Technical Jury was chaired by Pierluigi Panza and also included Cristina Battocletti, Benedetta Centovalli, Rolando Damiani, Giancarlo Marinelli, Luigi Mascheroni, Alessandra Necci, Sergio Perosa, and Filippo Tuena.
Emmanuel Exitu was born in Bologna and lives in Rome, where he has worked as a television writer and as a playwright for the Teatro di Documenti. From his first novel The Star of Kings, he adapted the screenplay for the eponymous RAI film. His Greater – Defeating AIDS, filmed in the slums of Kampala, Uganda, was chosen by Spike Lee as the best documentary at the Babelgum Contest in Cannes 2008. As the content manager of Wip Italia, The Digital Design Company, he is developing projects and podcasts dedicated to social issues and the construction of the common good.
THE BOOK: At 5:46 AM on October 15, 1943, the final-year nursing students of the Nightingale Training School for Nurses leave London for a hospital set up to care for the wounded arriving from the war fronts. Among the girls, excited in their impeccable uniforms, there is one who is slender and funny due to her long legs and big feet: her family had directed her towards the University of Oxford, but she decided to become a nurse. Her name is Cicely Saunders. During the endless nights in the ward, Cicely sees beautiful and brave young men, her peers, die in unspeakable suffering. She knows she can do nothing for them except what the doctors prescribe, yet she realizes with horror that for a doctor, every dying person is a lost cause, a professional failure. Cicely begins to do something to which she will dedicate her entire life: to note the attempts and failures, the insights, the good practices that allow alleviating the suffering of those who can no longer be cured. And when she understands that her nursing diploma is no longer enough, she graduates in Medicine and, in 1967, manages to open the first modern hospice: not a place to go to die, but where one can live until the last moment with dignity. Emmanuel Exitu draws inspiration from the story of Cicely Saunders – whose procedures are still considered by the WHO as the benchmark for improving the quality of life for terminally ill patients – to write a luminous novel that tells the mysterious embrace between pain and hope and concerns us all. The story of this woman with visionary tenacity tells us that suffering is defeated first and foremost with a medicine that we all can access, empathy, and that hope is, as Emily Dickinson wrote, “that thing with feathers / that perches in the soul” and can illuminate us until our last breath.
