Premio Pavese 2026
Date of the event:
The Premio Pavese 2026, the 43rd edition of the award promoted by the Cesare Pavese Foundation and the municipality of Santo Stefano Belbo, with support from the Piedmont Region, Fondazione CRC and Fondazione CRT, is awarded in the days before 4 November 2026, the date on which the winners are announced.[1] The award ceremony is held on Saturday 14 November 2026 at 5pm at the Church of SS. Giacomo and Cristoforo in Santo Stefano Belbo, in the province of Cuneo.[1]
The jury and the ceremony
The event is hosted by Giulio Graglia and includes a dialogue between the winners and the jury, chaired by Alberto Sinigaglia and made up of Gian Arturo Ferrari, Giulia Boringhieri, Chiara Fenoglio, Claudio Marazzini, Carlo Ossola and Pierluigi Vaccaneo.[1]
The winners
The Premio Pavese 2026 for non-fiction goes to Massimo Cacciari, professor emeritus of philosophy at Milan's San Raffaele University and a national member of the Accademia dei Lincei. The citation notes that Cacciari has "made the Greeks, fate and the word as threshold the centre of his research — the same territory in which Pavese, in his Dialogues with Leucò, sought his most difficult truth" [1]. His cited works include the tetralogy made up of Dell'Inizio (1990), Della cosa ultima (2004), Labirinto filosofico (2014) and Metafisica concreta (2023), published by Adelphi, as well as Hamletica (2009, reissued in 2026), Van Gogh (Morcelliana) and Kaos, written with Roberto Esposito (Il Mulino) [1].
The publishing prize goes to Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola, who founded Edizioni E/O in 1979 and, in 2005, Europa Editions, based in New York and London. The citation calls the publishing house's story "the one that most resembles a fairy tale with a happy ending" among Italian publishing stories, noting that E/O "draws its consistency from being based solely on the publisher's own taste" [1].
For the second year running, the Premio Pavese for poetry goes to a film director, Giovanna Gagliardo, a contributor to outlets such as «Il Giorno», «Il Messaggero», «La Repubblica» and «L'Espresso». The citation finds in her work a "solitude that has become a parable of consciousness and silence — not loss, but a conscious journey toward the depths of being" [1]. In cinema, Gagliardo debuted as co-writer of L'amica, directed by Alberto Lattuada; with Raffaele La Capria and Nelo Risi she wrote Una stagione all'inferno, a film inspired by Arthur Rimbaud's time in Africa, and she worked as collaborator and assistant director to the Hungarian filmmaker Miklós Jancsó, writing the screenplays for all his Italian films [1].
Related articles: Santo Stefano Belbo
Sources
- Cuneo24 — 4 November 2026