The 60th Edition of the Lerici Pea Poetry Prize was dedicated to “Poetry: the great mother of the Mediterranean”. The Lifetime Achievement Prize was exceptionally awarded to three important contemporary poets from different areas of the Mediterranean: Agi Mishol (Israel), Amel Moussa (Tunisia) and Gabriella Sica (Italy).
LericiPea Lifetime Achievement Prize 2014 to Agi Mishol
MOTIVATION
Agi Mishol, one of the most appreciated and popular Israeli poets, is author of sixteen poetry collections including “Momento” (Moment), “Note di piantagione” (Plantation Notes), “Graffio di gatto” (Cat Scratch), “Quaderno dei sogni” (Notebook of Dreams). She talks to her readers in a concise, sensitive and pungent way about her experience in an agricultural community and in a family living among different generations (her Hungarian parents with whom she arrived in Israel at the age of 4, their children and friends, work, love, death, everyday life). Mishol’s style is fresh thanks to her extra-literary studies – although she was awarded with many national and international prizes and she still teaches poetic writing, her verses still preserve this unique freshness. Her poem “Shaida” (Woman Martyr) about a twenty-year-old woman who committed suicide in a terroristic attack gives voice to the bewilderment we all feel in front of such a tragedy; it tells us about its incomprehensibility showing us the metaphorical short circuits that poetry is able to evoke from this black hole. Agi Mishol believes that poetry is able to speak about what is most important to us without both rhetoric and rivals and, therefore, has a unique and essential function in human culture, especially when we are absorbed in a world that is not only laughable but also tragic, where everyone always talks a lot without really telling anything. Agi Mishol is awarded with the LericiPea Lifetime Achievement Prize 2014 for giving voice to men and women from her Country and from all over the world.
LericiPea Lifetime Achievement Prize 2014 to Amel Moussa
MOTIVATION
The Tunisiam poet Amel Moussa is one of the greatest voices of Arabic poetry of South Mediterranean women because she was able to bring a new and disruptive sensitivity to this form of literature. She is a contemporary woman, a sociologist and a journalist, and her poetry starts from the roots of her own tradition to talk to us about today, about women in Islam in the modern society dominated by rapid transformation and serious troubles. And she talks about it with a high and pure, dreamlike and sensual lyricism, in which the material and historical level of existence merges with the spiritual and eternal ones: reality is spirit, spirit is reality. The main topics of her poetry are madness, wandering, passion, eros and the elements, especially water which is associated with the feminine values of life and creation.
LericiPea Lifetime Achievement Prize 2014 to Gabriella Sica
MOTIVATION
Since the last decades, Gabriella Sica has been a vivid and passionate presence in Italian poetry: she founded poetry magazines that elated many poetry seasons in Rome, she was a scholar and university professor, creator of videos about the major Italian poets of the last century. Through her complete poetry – from “La famosa vita” (The Famous Life) to “Le lacrime delle cose” (The Tears of Things) –, Gabriella Sica was able to mark out a sensitivity aimed at catching the unspoken and the invisible and, at the same time, the uniqueness of life, of its normality, of its humble roots. Her poetry, which is an original blend of Pascoli’s and Virgil’s tones, pursues a new and clear communication which is completely far from the obscurity of so many twentieth-century poetic experiences and obtains secure results. This is what makes Sica one of the most recognizable female voices in the literary scene nowadays
