Last Monday, at the Caffè Tommaseo in Trieste, the writer Diego Zandel was awarded the Fulvio Tomizza Prize 2023, assigned by the Lions Club Trieste Europa, now in its nineteenth edition and sponsored by the Municipality of Trieste.

The Lions Club Trieste Europa, founded in 2003, to honor the memory of the writer Fulvio Tomizza and his ideals of coexistence and sharing between peoples and cultures, values ​​that are part of the mission of Lionism, awards the “Fulvio Tomizza Award” every year to – this is the motivation – “a personality who, over time, has distinguished himself in the concrete affirmation of the ideals of mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence between the people of our lands”.

Diego Zandel – the promoters of the Tomizza Award recalled – was born in 1948 in the refugee camp of Servigliano, in the Marche, to parents from Fiume, forced to leave Fiume due to the well-known historical events that uprooted almost all Italian citizens from the city in the Quarnero.

His origins in Fiume, as he himself has explained several times, have directly and indirectly influenced much of his literary work, as a literary critic and as a publicist.

Zandel has long been impartially analyzing, together with Croatian scholars and historians, the historical wounds that divided the Italians and the Slavs, and since 2002, with the Croatian embassy in Italy, he has been working for years for a mutual understanding of the Italian and Slavic cultures. Also for this reason, the embassy of the Republic of Croatia has called him to inaugurate the Croatian section of the European Library.

Diego Zandel is the author of several novels and many short stories scattered in various collective anthologies, in particular his stories set in Istria, Fiume and Greece. He is particularly attentive to the Balkan world, about which he also writes for the media. His works are translated in Croatia and Greece. He has always worked in the world of publishing and communication, even when he worked, for a living, as a Telecom official.

He is currently an editor for fiction at Oltre Edizioni. He writes for “La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno”, “Il Piccolo” and “L'Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso”.

“By promoting the “Fulvio Tomizza Award”, with the approval of Mrs. Laura Levi Tomizza, honorary member of the club – commented the President, Maria Rosaria Cavalagli and the Secretary of the Lions Club Trieste Europa, Dario Stechina – “we wanted to give special importance to honoring people who in difficult years, of strong clashes and nationalistic divisions, spread and practiced mutual understanding and defended freedom of thought and culture.

“With pride – concluded the President and the Secretary of the Lions Club Trieste Europa – we can say that this award, different from the others dedicated to the literary work of the writer, is now a consolidated tradition in Trieste”.

Rosanna Turcinovich Giuricin, describing the life and works of the awardee, observed how this award is of exceptional importance to Zandel. “Perhaps – the journalist stated – it is the award that he would have most wanted to win because of his connection with Fulvio Tomizza and with the city of Trieste (and in this regard we thank the Municipality that has always supported this recognition). In fact, it was to Tomizza that Zandel submitted his first writings and it was Tomizza himself who encouraged him to continue because he had seen in him the makings of a writer”.

In past years, the award has been given to important figures, including: Predrag Matvejevic (2004), Ciril Zlobec (2005), Corrado Belci (2006), Giacomo Scotti (2007), Giorgio Pressburgher (2008), Nuccio Messina (2009), Fulvio Molinari (2010), Miljenko Jergovic (2011), Monika Bulaj (2012), Ivan Jakovcic (2013), Paolo Rumiz (2014), Simone Cristicchi (2015), Demetrio Volcic (2017), Mauro Covacich (2018), Raoul Pupo and Selene Gandini (2019), Milan Rakovac (2020), Rosanna Turcinovich Giuricin (2021) and Andro Merkù (2022).