HISTORY

Founded in 1973 by Edoardo Tiboni to honor Ennio Flaiano and constantly re-propose the study of his work, the Flaiano International Awards are a structure articulated in a series of events, exhibitions, conferences and shows in which concrete cultural motives come together: in the specific sense of the production of literary, theatrical, cinematic and television "facts" that culminate in the summer and autumn days of the awards ceremony.

The Flaiano International Awards, a precious heritage of Pescara and Italy, in their composite configuration, have been proposed and organized for a forty-four editions on precise and versatile assumptions. In particular, to honor and to remember the writer, who gives the name to the Award and the association - to honor Flaiano outside a cold commemorative practice, activating instead a series of events in which concrete cultural motives converged in the more specific sense of production and diffusion of literary, theatrical, cinematographic and television facts. The Film Festival, annually produced as a sounding board of the news brought from the big screen and also as a review of movies that have interested the basic factors of this specific and lucky form of language and communication, has recorded continuous attendances, calculated to many tens of thousands of spectators, mostly young.

Moreover, another significant "cultural" fact of the Flaiano International Awards is the increased ability of the cinematography to communicate and interest, through rigorous choices, taste and respect for art.

Another fixed point in the programming of the Flaiano International Awards is the attention to theatre, recognized as an art form capable of finding space in any time. The great protagonists of the scene, both Italian and foreign, are also rewarded, as the list of winners of the Awards clearly shows.

In the literary section, the Flaiano International Awards has always been the bearer of presences of excellence in Pescara, attracting annually the interest of writers of unquestionable importance, some of which later awarded the Nobel Prize as Seamus Heaney, José Saramago, Derek Walcott, Imre Kertesz and Jean Marie Le Clézio.

"I'm happy to be the protagonist together with great writers such as Daniel Pennac, Paulo Coelho, Enzo Bettiza, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Yves Bonnefoy of this truly extraordinary literary competition that has also made me known Flaiano."
Abraham B. Yehoshua

The fiction Flaiano Award has been won by books and authors who have represented and represent the best of the Italian and foreign publishing offer of recent years. The Award also makes use of the judgment of the so-called "Jury of 100" who is entrusted with the task of choosing from the novels finalists the winning work of the Superflaiano Award. For ten years now, the literary prize has been enriched with a section dedicated to Italianistics that assigns the recognition to an Italian work published abroad, a further sign of the meaning and importance that the Flaiano Award has now taken on.

Finally, the section reserved for television and radio assigns awards every year to authors, performers, journalists, presenters, radio programs, and distinguish itself more and more for the quality and originality of its choices, rewarding the popularity, but also the social, artistic, informative commitment, for a TV of leisure but also and above all for a TV of truth and seriousness.

ENNIO FLAIANO

Pescara, 5 March 1910 - Rome, 20 November 1972

Flaiano is one of the most original figures of contemporary Italian literature. Narrator, playwright, famous cinematographic author, he signed the subjects of the most beautiful films of Fellini, Antonioni, and other famous directors: he invented terms such as "la Dolce Vita" and terms such as "paparazzo" or "vitelloni". A brilliant author of aphorisms, he was an acrid and tragic moralist, his prose is marked by an original satirical vein and a lively sense of the grotesque through which the most paradoxical aspects of contemporary reality are captured.

His works include: "Time to kill", "One and one night", "The game and the massacre", "The white shadows", "Autobiography of the blue of Prussia", "Diary of errors", "The war explained to the poor", "The woman in the closet", "A Martian in Rome".