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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Silvia Ballestra

Silvia_Ballestra 2014 Alessio Jacona WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0.jpg
Silvia Ballestra, 2014 (Photo: Alessio Jacona WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Silvia Ballestra was born in Porto San Giorgio, Ascoli Piceno (Marche) in 1969. She graduated in Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Bologna and currently lives and works in Milan. The Abruzzi and Marche regions and the cities of Bologna and Milan play an important role in her fiction, where characters are often described as they move from the Italian province to bigger cities and back, a return often followed by a deep-seated sense of displacement.

Ballestra’s first short story was published in 1990 in the Papergang (Under 25 III) anthology edited by the author Pier Vittorio Tondelli (1955-1991), who played the role of mentor and became an important literary model for many other Italian writers of Ballestra’s generation. Since then, she has written novels, short stories, biographies, children’s fiction, essays and articles, and has translated books from English and French into Italian. Some of her works have been translated into French and German.

Her first book was the collection of short stories Compleanno dell’iguana (1991), which became a bestseller and achieved cult status among the generation of Italians who came of age in the early 1990s, as did Antò Lu Purk, the protagonist of ‘La via per Berlino’, the novella that opened the volume. Antò is a young man from Pescara who attempts to escape the frustrating life of the Abruzzi province first as an unsuccessful university student in Bologna, then as an expatriate in Amsterdam and Berlin, only to discover that he is still unable to overcome his own cultural limitations. Antò’s and his homonymous friends’ misadventures continue in La guerra degli Antò (1992), a satire of student life in Bologna in the early 1990s and of contemporary youth’s political ineffectiveness against the background of the First Gulf War as it plays out in the media. The tragi-comedy of the Antòs narrated in ‘La via per Berlino’ and La guerra degli Antò were republished as a combined text entitled Il disastro degli Antò (1997), and became the basis of the film La guerra degli Antò, written and directed by Riccardo Milani (1999).

Ballestra’s early narrative brought her to the attention of the intellectuals of the Italian neo-avant-garde, in particular Renato Barilli and Nanni Balestrini, who invited her to the first Ricercare meeting. Held in Reggio Emilia in 1993 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the 1960s avant-garde movement Gruppo 63, this event and the ones that followed on a yearly basis until 2004 had, among others, the purpose of promoting the emerging authors of the so-called ‘pulp generation’. Ballestra’s work was praised for its linguistic experimentation, particularly evident in her use of youth language and jargon and in the adoption of postmodern references to contemporary popular culture, as well as her innovative formal strategies. While she parodied the 1993 Ricercare meeting and its protagonists in the short story ‘Gli orsi (63-93)’, published in her third book, Gli orsi (1994), Ballestra’s links with the neo-avant-garde and the annual Ricercare events remained constant in later years, when she played the role of co-organizer and presenter.

Her dialogues with fellow Marche writer and activist Joyce Lussu, published under the title Joyce L. Una vita contro: diciannove registrazioni su nastro (1996), marked an important change of direction in Ballestra’s work, with the identification of a female literary model and explicit political engagement as guidelines for her subsequent narrative production. Indeed, the long-lasting significance of this personal and intellectual encounter would inspire Ballestra to write a full biography of Lussu about 25 years later (La Sibilla. Vita di Joyce Lussu, 2022). Ballestra's new focus on women’s lives and stories came to fruition in the so-called ‘Nina trilogy’, consisting of La giovinezza della signorina N.N. (1998), Nina (2001), and Il compagno di mezzanotte (2002), three novels connected by recurring characters, places, and female protagonists portrayed as they enter adulthood: the emphasis is on first heterosexual love, female friendship, and pregnancy or new motherhood, all presented as both private and public experiences, with significant political reverberations.

While in the ‘Nina trilogy’ Ballestra deliberately adopts more traditional narrative structures, in Tutto su mia nonna (2005), the first of her novels published by Einaudi in their series ‘Stile libero’, she returns to the more experimental forms of her earlier fiction. This time, however, she tells the story of three generations of women (narrator, mother, and grandmother) who devise their own language, inflected with regional dialect and ironic ‘family sayings’, to communicate with each other and share their experiences from a female perspective. In contrast, the historical novel La seconda Dora (2006) is told in a simple, if lyrical, realist mode, to convey as directly as possible the story of Jewish Dora during the Fascist persecution, the war, and her quietly remarkable life as a schoolteacher in the post-war years. A balance between obvious experimentation and more mainstream forms of narration is carefully negotiated in each of these texts, strictly linked to the political impact Ballestra wishes to achieve. This strategy reappears in I giorni della Rotonda (2009), a fiction that weaves together the memory of 1970s Leftist terrorism, the fall-out of political disenchantment, and the subsequent heroin addiction of a significant part of that generation, contrasted with the quiet resistance to the conservative backlash of many who, like Ballestra herself, grew up in the 1980s in provincial Italy.

Political commentary – present since her early works, as in the references to the rise to power of Silvio Berlusconi in the early 1990s or expressed as a parody of horror and science fiction genres in Gli orsi – becomes increasingly prominent in Ballestra’s mature production. Her belief in the public role of the intellectual inspired her to write two non-fiction works that discuss, respectively, the misogynistic backlash against women in Italian society, institutions, and the media (Contro le donne nei secoli dei secoli, 2006), and the need to uphold, as well as to understand better its social costs, the Law 194 that guarantees women’s reproductive rights, including the right to have an abortion (Piove sul nostro amore. Una storia di donne, medici, aborti, predicatori e apprendisti stregoni, 2008). In the same vein, she contributed, in the role of screenplay supervisor, to Alina Marazzi’s film Vogliamo anche le rose (2007), a documentary on women’s lives and the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Ballestra’s contributions to the literary journal Alfabeta2 and the bi-weekly column she wrote for the left-wing newspaper L’Unità during the year 2011, as well as her ongoing commentary on social and political events in traditional and social media, have often focused on the pervasiveness of gender inequality, whether in reference to current news or as a comment on the scant attention paid to women’s contribution to the Italian literary world. To counter the resistance of Italian intellectuals to acknowledge women writers, Ballestra published her first book for children, Christine e la città delle dame (2015), with illustrations by Rita Petruccioli, based on the life of 15th-century Italian-French writer Christine de Pizan: taking on the legacy of Pizan’s own work on the long tradition of women’s culture, Ballestra offers younger readers an alternative female literary model to the male-centric Italian canon.

Her more recent production has continued to highlight Italian women’s experiences, but it has also brought to the fore environmental and ecological themes, as for example in Amiche mie (2014), a polyphonic novel that chronicles the disillusionment of marriage, motherhood, and precarious work from the perspective of four women who share their political and social commitment through food activism. Similarly, in La nuova stagione (2019), the narrative of two sisters who try to sell their inherited land in the Marche interweaves with reflections on the environmental damage caused by corporate agricultural practices and on the patriarchal history of the region. In the same vein, Ballestra’s biography of the artist Tullio Pericoli, Le colline di fronte. Un viaggio intorno alla vita di Tullio Pericoli (2011), is developed around constant considerations on the geographical, historical, and social landscape of the Marche region that has informed both Pericoli’s and Ballestra’s works. The same love and concern for the environment is also central to Ballestra’s reportage on the role and fate of animals (abandoned, hurt, rescued, and heroic saviours of their human friends), following the devastating earthquakes of 2016 in the Tronto Valley and other parts of central Italy (Vicini alla terra. Storie di animali e di uomini che non li dimenticano quando tutto trema, 2017).

Ballestra has been awarded a number of literary prizes, including the Premio Fiesole Narrativa Under 40 in 1993 for La guerra degli Antò, the Premio Rapallo Carige per la Donna Scrittrice in 2006 for La seconda Dora, and the Premio Nazionale di Cultura Benedetto Croce Narrativa in 2020 for La nuova stagione. La Sibilla. Vita di Joyce Lussu was a finalist for the prestigious Premio Campiello. It won the Premio Letterario Pozzale Luigi Russo in 2023.

Compiled by Claudia Bernardi (Wellington), updated 2024