There are so many ways to burn a book

Erri De Luca with journalist Carlo Marino European News Agency

Rome [ENA] The bookstore "La Pecora Elettrica" (The electric sheep) in Rome's Centocelle district was targeted by arsonists who devastated the renowned anti-fascist bookstore on 5 november. Other anti-Fascist cultural entities have been attacked in Rome, too. “To burn books is just a mechanical combustion process: it’s an act through which one only burns paper and ink. The gesture that wants to burn those books is a barbaric

gesture, but its efficiency is zero because the books reproduce themselves like forests. The act of burning the books is a barbarous but vain gesture. Many poets who were prisoners in the twentieth century had a great gift, with which they went to prison: memory. They knew thousands of verses by heart and with them they exercised a resistance against forced silence “ – declared Erri De Luca (Naples,1950). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3Z3aoF8D_U The Italian writer has been recently defined as “the writer of the decade” by the Corriere della Sera literature critic Giorgio De Rienzo.

Yesterday, Erri De Luca was special guest in Rome book fair: Più libri, più liberi 2019: the national fair for small and medium Italian book publishing houses which is taking place for the second year at the Nuvola conference centre in the EUR district of Rome. It was only in 1989, when the author was almost forty and still worked as a bricklayer, that Feltrinelli published his first book, Non ora, non qui ( Not now, not here ). The book evokes his childhood in Naples. De Luca’s debut work, initiates the reader to a poetic style that, during the years, has become a congenial habit for many readers.

Tre cavalli (Three Horses: A Novel 1999), Montedidio (2001), La Montagna di Dio (God's Mountain translated by Michael Moore (2002) and Il contrario di uno (2003) are some of the books preceding the last book “Impossibile” (Impossible – 2019). A politically committed journalist, De Luca writes for various papers and for the magazine MicroMega. A passionate mountain climber, he also writes about the mountains. Erri De Luca lectured, among others, at University of Southern California (USC), University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and San Diego State University (SDSU) as well as at the IIC in San Francisco.

In France, he received the France Culture Prize in 1994 for Aceto, arcobaleno, the Laure Bataillon Award in 2002 for Tre cavalli and, also in 2002, the Fémina Étranger for Montedidio, translated in English as God's Mountain. In 2010 he was given the German international literary Petrarca-Preis. He has been a member of the jury at the Cannes Festival in 2003. In 2013, he received the European Prize for Literature. In 2016, he received European Book Prize for his novel "Le plus et le moins".