Italy to give away awards to best

Pakistani novelists at KLF

Karachi

The Italian Embassy in Islamabad and the Italian Consulate-General in Karachi will present the Italy Reads Pakistan Awards to the best novels authored by Pakistanis below 45.

Italian Consul-General Dr Gianluca Rubagotti announced this at a press conference at a hotel on Monday evening.

The purpose of these awards, he said, was to put Italy back on the map of Pakistani readership. For that, he said, people-to-people activities were the best tool.

Dr Rubagotti noted that the novels would be adjudged by a Pakistani jury and then translated into Italian before being adjudged in Italy.

He said that as was well known, Italy was a superpower in the cultural field. “Italy is the country with the largest number of UN-recognised heritage sites (51),” he said.

Only those works will be considered which have been published in Pakistan in 2014 and 2015 and 2016, in English or Urdu. Books that centre around contemporary times and contemporary issues will be preferred.

The winning novels will be announced at the KLF 2017.

Writer Andrea Berrini and art critic Sabiana Paoli will be visiting the festival.

Berrini is a specialist on Asian literatures and the publishing industry. The publishing company is Metropoli d’Asia.

“Metropoli d’Asia is doing a great job bridging the cultures of Italy and various Asian cultures,” Dr Rubagotti said.

The KLF, he said, was the best platform for such an enterprise and thanked Ameena Saiyid, Managaing Director, Oxford University Press

(Pakistan), for her cooperation in the enterprise. He acknowledged the vitality of the cultural and literary scene in Pakistan.

Besides, he said that there is the large Pakistani community in Italy, over 1,20,000, the biggest in continental Europe., who live, study and work there. Dr Rubagotti was quick to point out that all

of them were not workers, but were students and an academically and intellectually-oriented segment of society.

He said, “To a great bit of Italian society, Pakistan is not well-known. The idea, therefore, is to bring a bit of Pakistan to Italy. Since the market for Italian language books in Italy is far wider than books in English, we thought that the awards scheme would be the best way to bring Pakistan to Italy.”