Maddalena Fingerle

A native Italian speaker with a German surname, Germanist/ Italianist Maddalena Fingerle inevitably addresses the issue of linguistic identity. At the heart of Lingua madre (Italo Svevo, 2021) – winner of the Calvino Prize and the under-35 division of the Comisso and Flaiano awards – is Paolo Prescher, a bilingual Bolzanese obsessed with ‘dirty words’ that do not mean what they should. Fingerle has a great relationship with words and manages to combine them to give life to essays and stories. Among her publications are monographs on Torquato Tasso and Giovan Battista Marino in Lascivia mascherata (De Gruyter, 2022) and L’Adone non è noioso (Italo Svevo, 2023) and the story Una proposta stronza (Tetra, 2022). Her second novel is Pudore (Mondadori, 2024). Latest work translated to German: Muttersprache (Folio, 2022).