Margherita Podestà Heir is the winner of the fourth edition of the biennial ‘Mario Lattes’ Prize for Translation, translator of “Vaim” by the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, Nobel Prize for Literature 2023. In Italy the novel is published by the publishing house La Nave di Teseo. Created by the Bottari Lattes Foundation in collaboration with the Castello di Perno Association, for the 2026 edition it was decided to dedicate the prize to Scandinavian languages.
The experts who make up the specialist jury in this fourth edition, Daniela Marcheschi, Lorenzo Lozzi Gallo and Franco Perrelli, motivated their decision as follows:. “Jon Fosse’s text, characterized by the evanescence of the omnipotent author and the coalescence of times and figures in a narrative flow punctuated by repetitions, analogies, suspensions and sometimes imperceptible references, traces a particularly arduous path for the translator, whose breath must first be recreated, adapting not only to a – so to speak – non-Euclidean linguistic geometry, but modeling the translation with logical (and illogical) pauses that are not always sustained, in the original, with the aid of grammatical punctuation”. According to the jury, Margherita Podestà Heir has “largely overcome these difficulties, managing to return a version which, starting from the most essential and rough neo-Norwegian linguistic constructs, in the leap into the Italian language, preserves the incisiveness and inspiration of Fossi’s narration, expertly balancing its characteristic common language with the metaphysical efflorescences that still vibrate in it”. The hiuria also considered that this “new translation comes to confirm and crown a literary career that the winner has assiduously developed over time, already tackling texts of impervious complexity on other occasions”.
In a first phase, the finalist texts were selected by the permanent jury, composed of Anna Battaglia, Melita Cataldi, Mario Marchetti and Antonietta Pastore. The other finalists in the competition were Silvia Cosimini with “Varie cose sul sequoia e sul tempo” by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (Iceland, published by Iperborea) and Francesca Turri with “Una notte a Nuuk” by Niviaq Korneliussen (Greenland, published by Iperborea). The final ceremony was held at Perno Castle, among the hills of the Langhe, in the municipality of Monforte d’Alba. in the province of Cuneo, Led by the journalist Laura Pezzino, the event was also an opportunity to launch a round table led by Professor Franco Perrelli, during which the translators and members of the two juries discussed each other. Students from the Foreign Languages and Literatures course at the University of Milan also attended the event, thus having the opportunity to dialogue with specialists in the sector.