Librissimi Lifetime Achiement Award 2024
Since its founding in 2018, Librissimi – Toronto Italian Book Festival’s mission has been to promote Italian Canadian talent in literature, writing and publishing.
In May 2024 the Festival went a step further to expand that vision and commitment by estabishing the Librissimi Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Award celebrates the Literary Arts and aims to recognize special achievement and contributions in the realm of Italian Canadian writing and publishing. The Award also recognizes aspects such as exceptional body of work, creative or critical success, as well engagement with and support to the Italian Canadian literary arts community.
The inaugural honouree of the Librissimi Lifetime Achievement Award was Antonio D’Alfonso.
Poet, novelist, essayist, publisher and translator, Antonio D’Alfonso has published more than sixty books (including translations) and has made five feature films. He is the founder of the ground-breaking Guernica Editions (1978) which he managed for over thirty years before passing it on to new owners in 2010.
Through his work as publisher and editor, Antonio D’ Alfonso has helped nurture, develop, and promote Italian Canadian writing, giving many Italian Canadian authors their first home.
Antonio D’Alfonso is himself an accomplished author. For his writings, he won the Trillium Award and the F.G. Bressani Literary Prize. The Two-Headed Man: Collected Poems 1970-2020 was published in July 2020. His essays of In Italics: In Defense of Ethnicity (1996), Gambling With Failure (2005), and Poetica del plurilinguismo (2015) offer a unique perspective on decentralized identities. His books have been translated in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Estonian, and Portuguese. He has published, in 2022, Outside Looking In (Entries 1980-1981) and, in 2023, The Italian Canadian Writer. In Italian, he published ‘Federazione per il futuro’ in La diaspora italiana in Canada (Ed. A.J. Tamburri and S. Mangione, 2022).
He is also an accomplished film-maker. His film Bruco won the New York Independent Film Award. His most recent film, TATA (Daddy), was released in July 2020. He has started on Youtube a series of Conversations with artists and producers.
He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. In 2016, he received a Honorary Doctorate from Athabasca University.
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