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

Valeria Parrella

 

Valeria_Parrella, 2016 Mirco Cattelan per Amici di Piero Chiara (Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0).jpg
Valeria Parella, 2016 (Photo: Mirco Cattelan per Amici di Piero Chiara via WIkimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Born in Torre del Greco, near Naples, in 1974, Valeria Parrella has gained a remarkable place in the Italian cultural landscape during the last decades. In her literary production, Naples, where most of her works are set, is a very significant reality. Parrella made her debut as a writer with a collection of short stories, Mosca più balena (2003), for which she was awarded the Campiello Prize for best new writer and the Amelia Rosselli Prize, among others. The second collection, Per grazia ricevuta (2005), was shortlisted for the prestigious Strega Prize and won two awards: the Renato Fucini Prize and the Zerilli-Marimò.

In 2008 Parrella published her first and most successful novel, Lo spazio bianco. The story problematises the interconnectedness of a woman's identity as both mother and daughter. For the protagonist, becoming a mother entails coming to terms with her own mother and simultaneously interrogating her identity as a daughter in search of the kind of mother she wants to be. The tone of the novel combines a disillusioned observation of the reality experienced by the protagonist with a light touch of humour, as the author confronts life and death, pain and joy, discouragement and hope. The book won the Premio Letterario Basilicata. The complexity of the female protagonist attracted the attention of film director Francesca Comencini, who based her film Lo spazio bianco (2009) on Parrella's novel. The film entered the official competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2009 and was widely appreciated by both critics and the public. It was awarded the Fedic, the Pasinetti and the Pro Life prizes. Other works by Parrella, Il verdetto (2007), Ciao maschio (2009), Ma quale amore (2010) – which was awarded the Tomasi di Lampedusa Prize – and Lettera di dimissioni (2011) also deal with female protagonists at odds with cultural and social conventions.

A significant part of Parrella’s literary production is devoted to theatre: monologues, such as Il verdetto (2007) and Ciao maschio (2009), short plays, such as L’incognita 'Mah', published in Tre terzi (written by Parrella with Diego De Silva and Antonio Pascale, 2009), a libretto, Terra, written for the composer Luca Francesconi (2011), and Antigone (2012), a modernised version of the ancient Sophoclean tragedy, produced by the Teatro Stabile di Napoli. Antigone was awarded the Le Maschere del teatro Italiano Prize in 2013. In Assenza: Euridice e Orfeo (2015) Parella returns to focus on classical literature, revisiting with originality the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

In 2015 she contributed to the politically engaged volume La qualità dell’aria. Storie di questo tempo, edited by Nicola La Gioia and Christian Raimo, with the short story ‘Verissimo’. In the same year ‘Memorie di un cieco’ appeared in Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica, and a collection of short stories titled Troppa importanza all’amore was published by Einaudi. In 2016, Parella contributed to an anthology of short stories related to the game of tennis: Smash: 15 racconti di tennis with 'La sentinella'. In the following years her novels Enciclopedia della donna. Aggiornamento (2017), Almarina (2019), Quel tipo di donna (2020), and La fortuna (2022) saw the light.

A unifying feature of Parrella's writing is that it portrays the efforts of Italian women to fulfil their desires and ambitions within a society which, in many respects, is still conservative and hostile to them. Enciclopedia della donna offers a playful update of the original version of the encyclopedia who came out in the 1960s, adding information on sex. Almarina tells the story of the bond between two women in a juvenile jail, addressing the topics of freedom and solitude with intimate, political voice. The themes of friendship, bond, and freedom reappear in Quel tipo di donna, which tells the journey of four friends, all women ‘of a certain type’, who grew up with the example of other women who fought, loved, and lived before them. With La fortuna, Parrella returns to Naples and to her interest in ancient times and history to retell the story of the destruction of Pompeii in an updated and intimate way.

Parrella has recently returned to writing short stories, the genre that crowned her with success at the beginning of her career, publishing a long short story, L’archeologo (2020, in double version Italian and English), a collection of stories for children titled Favolette (2022) and the collection Piccoli miracoli e altri tradimenti (2024). She has also translated Rumer Godden’s novel, Il fiume (2018), and contributes to a number of newspapers and magazines, including La Repubblica, L’Espresso, and Grazia.

Parrella’s works have been translated into Arabic, Bosnian, Catalan, Czech, French, English, German, Hungarian, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish.

Compiled by Aureliana Di Rollo; Updated by Laura Lazzari (Switzerland)