The Pascoli Lifetime Achievement Award goes to singer-songwriter Paolo Conte

Paolo Conte has never made a secret of his love for the poet from San Mauro. In an interview with the “Corriere della Sera” he expressed himself as follows: “I loved Hemingway, Simenon, but above all Pascoli”. When he writes the lyrics of his songs he confided to the critic Alberto Sinigaglia, also Conte, that he had Giovanni Pascoli’s rhythm in mind. As highlighted in the motivation for the Award, Conte’s music is characterized by “elegant and unusual rhymes, built on a heterogeneous and unusual repertoire of terms, alien to the panorama of Italian song, and by unexpected phonetic contiguities: foreignisms, dialect forms, rare voices, allusions and semantic “frictions”, apparent nonsense, are part of that Conte lexicon which accentuates the alienating and evocative effect, the result of a very personal poetic taste and of a sensitive interpretation of a rich sample of humanity”. And in reference to the poet of San Mauro: Conte, “like Giovanni Pascoli, “discovers” invisible correspondences and gives back to the ordinary a new and surprising guise; like the poet, Conte, he digs beneath the surface, scrapes away a little roughness and reveals the essential. With a frank lexicon and a powerful rhythm, the Master’s verses constitute a true poetic corpus, the expression of a peculiar, frank and authentic linguistic and literary approach”.

The jury of the Pascoli Prize is made up of five literary experts and scholars: Daniela Baroncini (University of Bologna and president of the Pascoliana Academy, president of the prize jury), Franco Brevini (University of Bergamo and Milan), Gualtiero De Santi (University of Urbino), Gianfranco Miro Gori (essayist, poet), Piero Meldini (writer).