The Working Class Literature Festival, now in its third year, is looking towards the future: one of continual resistance against capitalist oppressions, global cycles of exploitation, and the exclusivity of cultural capital. With the themes of the first two editions being Genealogies and Geographies, the varied and passionate programme of 2025 is focused on Perspectives—corralled by a defiant and buoyant slogan at its center: “We will be everything.” This year, Veronica Gisondi reports from the Festival in Florence, the persistence at its core, and the contemporary context by which writers must address our classist social reality.
A spectre is haunting a factory on the outskirts of Florence. It is the spectre of class struggle, of community, of collective care: the life force with which Campi Bisenzio’s ex-GKN factory has been brimming since the mass dismissal of its workers in 2021. Home to the longest factory occupation in Italian history, the automotive components plant has been lending its premises to the Working Class Literature Festival since 2023. With more than seven thousand people attending this year’s festival, held from April 4 to 6, the popularity of Europe’s largest working-class cultural event can be read as a symptom of our time, where a widespread sentiment of distrust and frustration toward Italy’s famously conservative literary industry meets a shared need to carve out a space to reclaim, discuss, and problematize the power of working-class writing—a writing whose words are never given, but fought for—and a strong desire for unity and change.
The three-day initiative brought together blue-collar workers, trade unionists, writers, researchers, and a diverse range of publishing industry professionals to celebrate the power of class struggle, in the factory as much as on paper. Rather than being industry-backed, state-funded, or sponsored by banks (as is usually the case for major Italian literary events), the Working Class Literature Festival is independently subsidized. Thanks to the joint efforts of Collettivo di Fabbrica GKN, SOMS Insorgiamo, Edizioni Alegre, and Arci Firenze, in collaboration with Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, the factory was transformed from a self-contained, closed-off world into a porous space for concrete action—a space, as artistic director Alberto Prunetti said in his opening speech, “for poetry,” that is, poiesis: a process of emergence through which “things are made” and “new imaginaries” can be built. “It is our duty,” he added, “to create a future where factory work and literature can once again converge.” Inspired by the impact of the GKN workers’ ongoing struggle, the festival aims to break the boundaries of individualism and subjectivation to encourage collective forms of debate and active dissent that concern work, culture, and the publishing industry alike. As Prunetti wrote on Jacobin Italia, “one of the festival’s features is that it crosses literature and politics, and makes literature a political act.”
The festival’s third edition advanced a critical overview of the state of working-class literature and its relationship to class struggle, going beyond national borders and the here-and-now to address the controversies, biases, and pitfalls that underlie it. In France, for instance, the récit de transfuge de classe (the “class defector narrative”) has recently turned into a literary trend, as writer and translator Serge Quadruppani pointed out. While the genre’s latest iterations often seem to reduce the collective nature of class conflict and the political weight of working-class histories to a domesticated, individual scale that, being closed in on itself, more readily speaks to the taste of middle-class readers, the foundations of this newly-formed canon were laid by Annie Ernaux, Prix Renaudot-winner with La Place, published in English as A Man’s Place, and later cemented by sociologist and anthropologist Didier Eribon with Retour à Reims, whose English edition is Returning to Reims. Both identify themselves as transfuges—class traitors, so to speak—and both had to face the shame, humiliation, isolation, and estrangement that characterize the experience.
Ernaux and Eribon took a crucial step missed by many of their imitators: instead of diluting their narrative accounts of working-class reality, they situated the “I” as a subject within class history, opening up a dialogue with the past and with alterity. Like them, Anne Pauly, author of award-winning Avant que j’oublie, and Claudia Durastanti, who rose to public and critical acclaim with La Straniera, published in English as Strangers I Know, have also redeemed the category of “social autobiography” for themselves. In a panel dedicated to narrative forms and perspectives in working-class social histories, Pauly and Durastanti discussed an exquisitely literary variant of the impostor syndrome: Durastanti had to appropriate the dominant language to emerge as a writer, as Ernaux herself explains that she did in her email correspondence with Frédéric-Yves Jeannet, gathered in La scrittura come un coltello. Pauly, meanwhile, said that her class background meant that she was “allowed” to write a book only at forty, when her father’s death prompted her to write about “the obligation to masculinity,” that of a violent parent who loved her.
“What’s the cost of invention,” Durastanti asked, when the mere act of doing research “requires a significant amount of time spent reading—of time lost?” Time is a concrete but somewhat under-discussed aspect of literary production that, especially for working-class authors, can profoundly shape the development of one’s writing practice. “There’s a direct correlation between literary experimentation and the resources that allowed one to get there,” commented Durastanti. At the same time, there is a widespread reluctance to invest in working-class writers who aspire to write about class, work, and poverty while escaping pre-established formal codes, and “multiple marginalities” can easily end up overlapping, as was true for British writer Ann Quin, who, besides being a working-class woman writer in the 60s, wrote “difficult books” in a language that operated “at the edge of understanding.” The issue of form comes forth as a double bind: an often precluded mode of praxis on one side, and a hindrance to publication or recognition the other.
A resistance to new formal configurations is among the ways the romanticization of the working-class condition can manifest in the literary field, with constrictive expectations placed upon the expression of working-class subjectivities, languages, and legacies, in writing as in most art forms. Others are a blind attachment to “traditionally working-class” themes, whose offspring is the futile quest for authenticity—which goes hand in hand with the still-present tendency to fetishize representations of poverty and violence. When combined, these criteria produce a silent system of classification that can feel smothering instead of freeing, a taxonomy that defines who is allowed to speak and how. In this respect, Durastanti mentioned Pilar Quintana’s novel La perra, in which the Colombian writer skillfully exposed the violence of poverty and the hidden truths of domestic labour—despite not being working-class herself, much to the audience’s surprise. At the same time, “authentically” working-class writing is often subject to suppression, as researcher Luka Lei Zhang pointed out, highlighting a growing body of literature by working-class (and often migrant) authors in China and other Asian countries whose writing is affected by political censorship (which favors de-classed, compliant stances over radical ones), the allocation of US and Canadian funds, and western biases in translation.
As Zhang implied, the relationship between translation and the representation of working-class literature across the industry is far from linear. Translators aren’t always able to preserve—or willing to uphold—the codes of working-class language. The danger of inadvertently falling for limiting and detrimental beliefs, or yielding to patterns of normalization and exoticization, is ever present. On this matter, translator Annalisa Romani stressed that the publishing industry is, first and foremost, a socio-political field. The success of a book, its access to French or English translations, the timeliness of its publication, and publishing policies more broadly are historically, politically, and economically determined: they are factors that, according to Romani, “a militant critique” should never overlook.
Professor Emanuele Zinato, for his part, insisted that cultural workers should “rebuild a critical grammar of resistance from scratch.” Joining the panel on working-class literature and militant literary criticism, he recalled that the task of the critic is to reveal the inner “truth content of a work of art,” as Walter Benjamin wrote in his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities. He argued that it is equally essential to recognize “work” not just as a literary theme, but “as a relationship and a condition, a permanent conflict that permeates material reality and the imaginary.” It is precisely through conflict that struggles (including, but not limited to, class struggles) become alive. To this end, Zinato drew from the history of Italian literature and its critical tradition, which, since the 20th century, has extensively dealt with the theme of work, often by calling working conditions directly into question. Zinato referenced two working-class authors in particular—Tommaso Di Ciaula and Luigi Di Ruscio. The former dealt with these themes in Tuta Blu, the latter in Palmiro, published with the help of Paolo Volponi, who, without being working-class himself, wrote a pivotal text on the fatal interpretive mix-up of Italian worker movements with terrorism, Le mosche del capitale.
Professor Mimmo Cangiano’s position is that, if material conditions are the weathered slate on which the working class carves its own history, and if literature has to embrace social and political conflict once again, the “Marxist critic” has to “seize or destroy” the legacy of bourgeois culture. Cangiano underlined how bourgeois literature has historically refrained from relating the thoughts and actions of its characters to the economic structures in which they act: “The bourgeois literary subject has never stopped perceiving him or herself as autonomous.” Marxist criticism, however, teaches us that, as long as we have to sell our labour power—our capacity to work—in order to live, we are neither autonomous nor simple subjects, as Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions precociously exemplified. “We are objects, too,” continued Cangiano, adding that the “subaltern subjectivity” is a product of capitalism as much as individualism, commodification, and exploitation. This is accurately portrayed in Works by Vitaliano Trevisan, who exposed the horrors of contemporary capitalism to show how literature runs the risk of replicating its very same logic, that of marketization, from which cultural spaces in turn are not immune from. Working-class literature, then, appears both as a symptom and a tool for critiquing our present, and confronts us not with surrender, but with the need to react.
Other than shifting our point of view, working-class literature offers us an alternative, the possibility of an end to exploitation, providing glimpses into contingent futures, which is why poetry has always been “an instrument of resistance and self-portrayal,” as activist Emily Zendri observed during the panel on working-class poetry’s genealogies and perspectives. It still is, as the Arab Spring, the Gezi Park protests, and the Palestinian people’s struggle demonstrate: “even during genocide, poetry has never stopped being written,” noted Zendri. Audre Lorde notably defined poetry as “the most economical” of all art forms. In Sister Outsider, she described it as “the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. . . the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women.” Speaking on the same panel as Zendri, Professor Bernardo De Luca emphasized how poetry has historically been used to “shape” one’s subjectivity, anticipating other ways of individual and relational “shaping” that bring together the social, the cultural, and the political. For working-class writers, working with poetry means giving shape to the “shapelessness” with which the upper classes have branded them—something that writer, activist, and politician Rocco Scotellaro (among twentieth-century Italy’s most distinctive poetic voices, alongside his dear friend and fellow poet Amelia Rosselli) knew well.
Finding one’s shape through writing is a bottom-up approach that allows working-class authors to break free from the gaze of the master—perhaps temporarily, but long enough to build new hopes for different modes of existence. As a closing note, it might need to be stressed that a meaningful, generative conception of working-class literature can no longer be limited to the criteria we have inherited, which narrow it down to first-hand accounts of working-class lives or stories on the topic of “work” told from the perspective of workers. In fact, the festival aimed to “take that weight off our shoulders,” in the words of its artistic director. If working-class literature is “an act of care,” following Prunetti, taking care of working-class histories also means reclaiming the transformative power of writing to unburden the working class from work and from the duty to represent it. It means both narrating the lives and nurturing the work of those that have been historically excluded from the publishing industry, either because they lacked social, economic, and cultural capital, or due to an even more fundamental lack—that of time, whose passing irreversibly marks each life spent at service of work. It means embodying ways of being-in-common that can cultivate conflict, look after dissent, mend individual and collective wounds, awaken us to the magnitude of our mutual strengths.
Veronica Gisondi is a writer and translator based in Milan. She works across critical theory, poetry, contemporary art and cultural criticism. Her writing has been featured in Rivista Studio, Coeval Magazine, Lampoon Magazine, Conceptual Fine Arts, Jungle Magazine, Droste Effect Magazine, no exits, and SINK, among others. She’s the founder of Incunabula, an independent editorial project for the dissemination of Italian writing in English translation. Its first release, published in April 2025, is Letters to the Blind by Camilla Salvatore. She holds an MA in Culture, Criticism and Curation from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London.
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