The Italian Cultural Institute Cologne, in collaboration with the Association of Friends of the IIC Colonia, is also taking part in the 2026 VDIG (Association of German-Italian Cultural Societies) reading marathon, which is supervised by Janina Vahl and this year is dedicated to Grazia Deledda on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of her Nobel Prize award.

The event will take place on March 5 from 18:30 - 20:30 in the Institute's theater hall and will be moderated by Paola Barbon.

2026 marks the centenary of the Nobel Prize she was awarded in 1926. To date, she is the only Italian woman to have been awarded this prize for literature. And yet, a century later, she is still almost completely unknown. Grazia Deledda was born in Nuoro, the capital of Barbagia. A region of Sardinia, almost an island within the island of Sardinia, which at the time only had around seven thousand inhabitants. As a woman in a male-dominated world, she grew up in a peasant and pastoral society that was just beginning to change and bourgeoisify. She faced enormous obstacles: Sardinian as her mother tongue, the longing for independence, the distrustful village and the narrow boundaries of the female role model. All of this became the breeding ground for her literature, an inner struggle that she transformed into language. Grazia Deledda was not an aloof intellectual, but a woman with heart and depth, who gave a voice to people and their contradictions. Her spirituality and inner fire are still alive today and invite us to see the present with completely new eyes.

Paola Barbon was born in Milan and lives and works between Münster and Milan. She studied literature and now works as a presenter, dramaturge, translator and interpreter. Most recently, she taught Italian literature at the Ruhr University Bochum.

Free admission.

If you are interested in reading one of the selected excerpts, please send us an e-mail to iiccolonia@esteri.it and let us know your full name and the language in which you would like to read (Italian or German). We will get back to you with information about the available excerpts.

The VDGI reading marathon is part of the oli(omaggio alla lingua italiana - homage to the Italian language) project, which is sponsored by the Italian Embassy in Berlin.