Posts by Veronica Gisondi

The 2025 Turin International Book Fair: Going the Distance

May 28, 2025  |  in Dispatches  |  by Veronica Gisondi

Turin’s International Book Fair made some tentative but promising progress to outline an expanded conception of Europe. . .

Now in its thirty-seventh edition, the Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino, or the Turin International Book Fair, continues to be a vital occasion for the literary community, gathering a diverse and lauded array of writers from around the globe to speak about their craft and its reflection of the world. This year, the theme “Le parole tra noi leggere/ Words fall lightly between us” gestured towards the need for literature to create connections and compassions; in the following dispatch, Veronica Gisondi reports on the illuminations to be found in this “between,” capturing the intersections and collisions that marked this year’s Fair.

This year, the Turin International Book Fair gathered a constellation of voices that, like a compass, revealed multiple paths to traverse the conflicts of the present and the complexities that await us, prefiguring a future expectant with the consequences of increasing inequality, oppression, and unbridled political violence. In these crossings, the fair also bridged a distance—the one that separates Europe from the rest of the Mediterranean, its ancient cradle—which has, for too long, appeared bigger than it actually is.

Some of the speakers that enlivened the fair’s thirty-seventh edition—held on May 15 to 19 in Lingotto, a former Fiat car factory—dissected the impact of being subjected to settler-colonial violence and the potential of literature in resistance. A dialogue between the Palestinian short-story writer Ziad Khaddash and Palestinian-Syrian writer and journalist Raed Wahesh took place on the anniversary of the Nakba (a day that signals the start of a long process of occupation and expropriation); in observance, Grazia Dell’Oro, Wahesh’s Italian publisher, remarked that “for us Westerners, anniversaries are often a way to clean our conscience. But we believe that the lively literary life of the Palestinian world needs to be remembered and promoted here at the fair,” and further stressed the risks of “the victimization that comes with an Orientalist gaze.” READ MORE…

The Working Class Literature Festival: Forms Worth Fighting For

May 8, 2025  |  in Dispatches  |  by Veronica Gisondi

Working-class literature, then . . . confronts us not with surrender, but with the need to react.

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.” READ MORE…