The Civil Word

There is a thread running through the entire body of work of Dacia Maraini, from the mute Marianna Ucrìa of eighteenth-century Sicily to the women in Buio whom the news cycle forgets as soon as it names them: the refusal to leave certain bodies, certain memories, certain voices without language. Winner of the Premio Campiello and the Premio Strega, her writing is a form of civic literature that for decades has asked readers to trust what history prefers not to say—and has always found its own form in that trust.