The Premio Strega: Every Winner Since 1947, and Which Ones Are in English
Italy’s biggest literary prize is decided by a jury of more than four hundred people who call themselves the Amici della domenica — the Sunday friends — and it is named after a liqueur, because the distiller who paid for it in 1947 made Strega. Winning it moves a book to the front of every window in Italy. The difficulty for anyone reading in English is that the prize is for books written in Italian, so the real question is not who won but which of them you can actually get. Of the 80 winners, 43 exist in English.
By Lisanne Swart · 80 winners since 1947 · 43 of them in English · Authors by country · Last reviewed 17 September 2026
The last fifteen winners · 2012 to 2026
Click a spine to jump to that book below.
Quick answer
The Premio Strega has gone to a novel written in Italian every year since 1947, decided by a jury of more than four hundred readers, writers and critics who vote in July. The winner gets five thousand euros and, far more usefully, a place on every front table in the country. There have been 80 winners and no year has ever been skipped. The 2026 winner is I convitati di pietra by Michele Mari. Only 43 of the 80 have ever been published in English, and knowing which 37 have not is the part nobody else writes down.
How this page chooses
Two jobs, kept apart. The table lists every winner from 1947 to 2026 with its Italian title and, where one exists, the English edition — facts only, including the years where the honest entry is that there is nothing to buy in English.
The fifteen with a full entry are simply the fifteen most recent, 2012 to 2026, one for each year. There is no ranking in it and no shortlist of favourites. What the recent fifteen have in common is practical: they are all still in print in Italy, and most are in English too. Under each one is a line of plain fact — the translator, another prize, the vote count — and nothing that cannot be checked.
Quick facts about the Premio Strega
Founded
In 1947, by Maria and Goffredo Bellonci, out of Sunday gatherings at their flat in Rome
Paid for by
Guido Alberti, of the Strega liqueur firm in Benevento — which is where the name comes from
Prize money
€5,000
Announced
Early July, traditionally the first Thursday, live on Rai 3 since 2014
The jury
The Amici della domenica: 170 at the founding, now more than 400, plus institutional votes — 643 ballots were cast in 2026
The shortlist
The cinquina, five finalists chosen in a first ballot; a safeguard clause promotes the best-placed small-publisher title, which is why recent years have had six
Winners
80, one for every year since 1947
In English
43 of 80
Won it twice
Paolo Volponi (1965, 1991) and Sandro Veronesi (2006, 2020)
Latest winner
I convitati di pietra by Michele Mari, 2026
The last fifteen Premio Strega winners, 2012 to 2026
Oldest first, one for each year. Where a book exists in English the English title is the heading and the Italian one is underneath; where it does not, the Italian title is the heading. The line in red is a fact about the book, not an opinion about it.
01
NovelTwo brothers
Inseparabili. Il fuoco amico dei ricordi
Alessandro Piperno · 2012
Filippo and Samuel Pontecorvo are brothers whose lives run in opposite directions. Filippo is idle and spends his time on women, food and comics, until a cartoon he makes about child abuse brings him fame; Samuel is the studious one, works in finance in Milan and becomes involved with Ludovica, a withdrawn young woman from the city’s upper class. Their mother Rachel watches over both of them, and a secret in the family shapes what happens to all three.
Tommaso Aricò was a fat boy who became a failed mathematician and then a man of high finance. He moves through a world of television people, politicians and organised crime, piling up money by means he does not explain, and keeps several separate lives going at once. The book is set in that world of accumulation, where the line between good and evil is left unclear.
Piccolo dates his becoming a communist to a football match in 1974 and works outward from there through the public life of Italy. The book moves between the Moro kidnapping, Berlinguer’s funeral and the Berlusconi years, and sets private episodes – books read, love affairs, work – beside them. It is half the story of the Italian left and half the story of one life.
Clara Salvemini, daughter of the Bari property developer Vittorio Salvemini, is found naked and covered in blood on a road and dies; the death is recorded as suicide. Her estranged half-brother sets out to find what really happened, and what the family’s rise was built on. The novel is set in Bari and the surrounding Puglian coast in the 1980s.
Published in English as Ferocity, translated by Antony Shugaar (Europa Editions, 2017).
The narrator, a writer who shares the author’s name, looks back at the all-boys Catholic school he attended in a middle-class district of Rome, with its cliques, beatings and priests. Among his classmates is Arbus, a nerdish boy who studies ways of killing people, and the pupils divide between communists and fascists. The book turns on a real crime of 1975, in which three former pupils of the school kidnapped, raped and murdered two teenage girls.
Filmed as La scuola cattolica, directed by Stefano Mordini, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2021.
Pietro, a lonely boy from Milan, meets Bruno, a local boy, during a family summer in the Aosta Valley in north-western Italy. They spend their summers walking the meadows and peaks above the village, and the friendship lasts into adult life. Bruno stays in the mountains while Pietro travels, and the book follows both lives over several decades.
Filmed as The Eight Mountains (2022); the English translation is by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre.
The book opens on 1 August 1937 at the Paris funeral of Gerda Taro, the German-Jewish war photographer who was half of the name Robert Capa and who was killed covering the Spanish Civil War. Her life is told through three people who knew her: Ruth Cerf, a friend from Leipzig, Willy Chardack, a former lover, and Georg Kuritzkes, a lover who fought in the International Brigades. Behind them are the 1930s, the depression and the rise of Nazism.
Published in English as The Girl with the Leica, translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2019).
The novel covers Italy from 23 March 1919, when the Fasci italiani di combattimento were founded in Milan, to 3 January 1925, when Mussolini told the Chamber of Deputies that he took responsibility for the killing of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti. It is narrated in the third person, with passages in Mussolini’s own voice, and every event, character and speech in it is drawn from the documentary record. It is the first book of a five-volume sequence.
Adapted as an eight-part Sky Atlantic series directed by Joe Wright, first shown on 10 January 2025.
Marco Carrera is an eye doctor, nicknamed the hummingbird because he stopped growing early. He marries Marina, a flight attendant, rather than Luisa, the woman he has loved since adolescence, and keeps writing to Luisa while his marriage breaks down; he also has a daughter, a dead sister and a brother he no longer speaks to. The story plays out mostly in Rome around the turn of the millennium and is told out of order, through letters, emails, postcards and dialogue.
Published in English as The Hummingbird, translated by Elena Pala (HarperVia).
Trevi writes portraits of two friends of his who were both writers and both died before their time: Rocco Carbone and Pia Pera. Carbone is described as aggressive and tormented, Pera as sensitive and easily hurt, and Trevi sets their two ways of living side by side. The book is about the friendship between the three of them rather than about a plot.
Francesco tells the story of his long attachment to Claudia, a school classmate, from their adolescence in the 1980s and 1990s onwards. Both are misfits in Martina Franca, the town in Puglia where they grow up, and both work out their sexuality at different points in their lives. The novel moves between Martina Franca and Berlin; its title is the local dialect word for people who are out of place.
Published in English as Spatriati, translated by Michael F. Moore (Other Press, 2024).
D’Adamo writes directly to her daughter Daria, who was born with holoprosencephaly after a prenatal diagnosis was missed and who cannot speak or move freely. The book records the years of seizures, feeding problems and hospitals, and the other mothers she meets in the same position. Set largely in Rome, it goes on to D’Adamo’s own breast cancer diagnosis in her fifties and the treatment that follows.
Awarded posthumously: D’Adamo died on 1 April 2023 and the prize was announced on 7 July 2023.
Amanda leaves Milan and comes back to her family’s town near Pescara, in Abruzzo, where she shuts herself away; her mother Lucia sees at once that something has happened to her. The family owns an abandoned campsite on a mountain called Dente del Lupo. Years earlier three young women disappeared up there, when Lucia was the age Amanda is now, and Lucia has kept what she knows from her daughter.
Published in English as The Brittle Age, translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions).
A son marks ten years since he last saw his parents and goes back over the family he left. He describes his father’s violence, his mother’s silent acceptance of it, and the patriarchal household they built together. The book follows his move away from them and into a life of his own.
Published in English as The Anniversary, translated by Geoffrey Brock (Other Press).
On 22 July 1975, at a reunion dinner, thirty former classmates agree to pay a sum into a common fund every year; the money is to go to the last three of them left alive. They meet again every year, and the pact turns the reunions into a wait for each other’s deaths. The novel follows them through the decades, past 2050, through old grudges, hidden attachments and growing envy.
Won with 190 of the 643 votes cast, announced on 9 July 2026 in Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome.
All 80 winners, with the Italian title and the English edition where there is one. The 15 rows in red are the fifteen most recent, which have a full entry above.
The standing criticism of the Strega is that it belongs to the publishers rather than to the books. Mondadori has won it more often than anyone else, nine of those wins in the 2000s alone, and the accusation has always been that a jury of four hundred friends delivers block votes to the big houses.
The response has been to widen the electorate and to write in a safeguard: if no book from a small or medium publisher makes the five finalists, the best-placed one is promoted anyway. That is why the cinquina has lately been a group of six, and in 2022, for the first time, a group of seven.
Sunday afternoons in Rome
The prize started as a habit. Maria and Goffredo Bellonci had writers round to their flat in Rome on Sunday afternoons during the war and after it; the regulars called themselves the Amici della domenica, and in 1947 they turned themselves into a jury. Guido Alberti, whose family firm in Benevento distilled the Strega liqueur, paid for it and gave it his product’s name.
The list of winners since then is close to a reading list for the Italian twentieth century: Cesare Pavese, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa for Il gattopardo in 1959, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Umberto Eco for Il nome della rosa in 1981, Claudio Magris. Elsa Morante was the first woman to win it, in 1957, and by 2024 only thirteen women had.
In 2023 it went to Ada D’Adamo, who had died on the first of April that year.
Frequently asked questions about the Premio Strega
What is the Premio Strega?
Italy’s best known literary prize, given every July since 1947 to a book of narrative fiction written in Italian. It is decided by a jury of more than four hundred readers, writers and critics called the Amici della domenica, and it is named after the Strega liqueur, whose maker paid for it.
Who won the Premio Strega in 2026?
Michele Mari, for I convitati di pietra, published by Einaudi. It was announced on 9 July 2026 in Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome, the first time the final vote has been held there, and Mari took 190 of the 643 votes cast.
How much is the Premio Strega worth?
Five thousand euros under the current rules. The money has never been the point: the prize reliably moves tens of thousands of extra copies and puts the book on the front table of every bookshop in Italy.
How many Premio Strega winners are available in English?
43 of the 80. That leaves 37 that have never been published in English, and the table on this page marks each one rather than quietly leaving it out.
What is the cinquina?
The shortlist. In a first ballot each juror picks three books from a longlist of up to twelve, and the five with the most votes go through. If none of the five comes from a small or medium publisher, the best-placed one is added, which is why the cinquina of five is often a group of six.
Has anyone won the Premio Strega twice?
Two writers have: Paolo Volponi, in 1965 and 1991, and Sandro Veronesi, in 2006 and 2020.
Which famous books have won the Premio Strega?
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il gattopardo won in 1959, Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa in 1981. Cesare Pavese, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi and Claudio Magris have all won it.
Why is the Premio Strega named after a liqueur?
Because the distiller paid for it. Guido Alberti, whose family firm in Benevento makes the Strega liqueur, funded the prize when the Amici della domenica founded it in 1947, and it has carried the name ever since.
What is the difference between the Premio Strega and the Booker Prize?
The Strega is for books written in Italian and is decided by a jury of hundreds who vote in public; the Booker is for novels written in English and published in the UK or Ireland, and is decided by five judges behind closed doors. The Strega announces a longlist, a shortlist and a winner within about five months.
Where can I find more Italian writers?
My guide to authors by country goes wider than the prize, for Italy and for everywhere else.
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