Strega Prize Ragazze e Ragazzi 2024

The winners of the ninth edition of The Strega Prize Ragazze e Ragazzi are:

6+ CATEGORY
Jarvis, Orso e Uccellina. Il picnic e altre storie, translated by Alessandra Valtieri (Lapis)

8+ CATEGORY
Maddalena Vaglio Tanet, Rim e le parole liberate, illustrated by Ilaria Mancini (Rizzoli)

11+ CATEGORY
Kelly Yang, Motel Calivista, buongiorno!, translated by Federico Taibi (Emons)

BEST NARRATIVE IN PICTURES CATEGORY 
Jérémie Moreau, I Pizzly, translated by Stefano Andrea Cresti (Tunué).

Jérémie Moreau tells a story of deep feelings within the complexity of the contemporary world, amidst the difficulties of life in dehumanised cities and the ferocity of natural environments turned upside down by human action. The author uses the language of the comic strip to draw us into a visual story of incredible impact that tackles issues of great importance, such as our dependence on technology, the difficulty of reconnecting with nature and our blindness in the face of environmental collapse. Devoid of facile rhetoric but with the snappy rhythm of an adventure novel and an impeccable display of visual-narrative technique, La storia dei Pizzly is a long, dazzling metaphor of how detached we have become from our roots and from the sacred matrix of life, and of the importance of reconnecting with it in order to face our future on the planet.

The members of the committee explain their choices:

For three years now, the jury of the Strega Prize Ragazze e Ragazzi has been assigning the award for the category of Best Picture Book. In these three years we have read some magnificent books: each of them has, to some extent, challenged the relationship between images and words as we thought we knew it. We have therefore always sought to read them with new eyes, ready to be stunned and captivated by the stories told in the illustrated pages of the books submitted for the award. This year, once we had identified the three finalists and the book that deserved a special mention, we noticed that some of the titles share, though not directly, a theme, tone or dark narrative temperature and a disenchanted look at our reality. We came to the realisation that this is how our world is today – ruthless and yet still beautiful – and that our lives are fragile and precious. (Martino Negri, Ilaria Tagliaferri, Virginia Tonfoni)

A special mention was assigned to:

Olga Tokarczuk, Il Signor Mirabile, illustrated by Joanna Concejo, translated by Raffaella Belletti (Topipittori).

Signor Mirabile is a book everyone should read. Beautiful and terrible, it is a merciless critique of the contemporary world, masterfully conducted by the authors with the weapons at their disposal: calibrated words that, through fiction, tell a story with a force of which only poetry is capable, and figures constructed with the highest compositional skill and painstaking patience. The protagonist’s obsession with his own appearance, which leads him to photograph himself in every corner of the world, is narrated through the skilful alternation of text and images, until it is only the world that remains to be portrayed, in the form of sudden and mysterious glimpses of both urban and natural contexts within which Mirabile is paradoxically a fleeting, almost dissolved shadow. The book is an editorial object of refined beauty worth savouring slowly.

BEST DEBUT BOOK CATEGORY 
Matthew Gray Gubler, Rumple Buttercup, translated by Sante Bandirali (uovonero)