Niccolò Ammaniti: ‘Adolescents tell their inner worlds best of all’

“Adolescents are perfect protagonists for discovering new worlds. Just as continents are discovered, feelings and desires are also discovered. Huge mistakes are made, but at the same time one has the ability to recover, to perceive worlds that seem incommunicable. And precisely this incommunicability, which is typical of adolescence and which everyone experiences in their own way, in my opinion is what literature is best able to tell.” The writer Niccolò Ammaniti, winner of the 2026 Hemingway Prize for Literature, said this during a meeting in Lignano Sabbiadoro (Udine) dedicated to his latest novel published by Einaudi, “The Guardian”. With a story set in an isolated Sicilian village and centered on the young Nile, charged with guarding a dark and ancient secret, Ammaniti has returned to investigate adolescence as a place of love, fear and desire, confirming his gift of knowing how to delve, always with happiness and narrative lightness, into the most enigmatic and profound forms of our soul.

“I believe that not even cinema is able to enter into the thoughts of characters as literature is able to do – explained Ammaniti –. This is also why I love teenagers: they are always surprising, always capable of changing a story and transforming it, as happens in Ti preco e ti porta via or in Anna. They are characters that you just start to sketch, but then they are the ones who come to life and lead you to the end of the novel. You simply have to follow them.”

The 42nd edition of the Hemingway Award, conceived and promoted by the Municipality of Lignano Sabbiadoro with the support of the Departments of Culture and Productive Activities and Tourism of the autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, through the consolidated collaboration with Fondazione Pordenonelegge.it, will close the Awards Ceremony this evening in Lignano Sabbiadoro: on stage with Niccolò Ammaniti, the other winners of this edition: the psychiatrist Paolo Crepet in the Adventure of Thought category, the essayist and sinologist Giada Messetti in the Lignano per il Futuro 2026 section, the Turkish-Kurdish writer Burhan Sönmez in the Witness of Our Time section and the photo-artist Paolo Gasparini for Photography/Photobook with a video greeting from Venezuela. The Award Jury will be present, led by president Alberto Garlini with Gian Mario Villalta, artistic director of pordenonelegge, and photography historian Italo Zannier.