Niccolò Ammaniti
Anna
A novel, Einaudi Stile Libero, September 2015, 284 pages

TV series broadcasted in Italy in 2021 and distributed all over the world.

Financial Times Best Books 2017 – Fiction in translation

“Ammaniti sets a new standard in post-apocalyptic fiction”
John Burnside, The Guardian

“This unbeatable storytelling – an immediate and engaging study of humanity at its best and worst.”
Zoë Apostolides, Financial Times

“Anna has pretty much everything you could hope for from a post-apocalyptic picaresque adventure story”. London Review of Books

Imagine a Sicily as mysterious as a forgotten continent, where there is no electricity and wild dogs follow you on the highway. A ruthless virus has exterminated the adults and left the youth alive. In this world of cadavers and useless objects, the children play, fight and love. And now imagine Anna, thirteen years old, and Astor, her eight-year-old brother. They inherited a prodigious desire to survive and a notebook in which their mother gave them instructions on how to do so.

Few writers have known how to recount the fragility of destiny, opening it wide before our eyes with all its naked biological energy. But no one has incarnated it with so much softness in the gaze of a thirteen-year-old, marvelously stubborn in her ability to sniff out, like an animal, every possibility for survival. In a primitive landscape shorn of the civility warmth, Anna, her brother and a large dog set out on an initiatory voyage through roads and forests, malls and houses falling apart, in quest for an obscure happiness. With Anna, Niccolò Ammaniti has written his most ambitious and heart-rending novel. A miraculous homage to life.

“After the epidemic Anna had plunged into a loneliness so vast and dull as to leave her an emptied idiot for months, but not once, not even for a second did the idea of putting an end to it all cross her mind, because she felt that life was stronger than all this. Life doesn’t belong to us, it cuts through us.”

Anna is a Sky Original series commissioned by Sky Studios for Sky Italia, produced by Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Mieli with Lorenzo Gangarossa for Wildside, part of Fremantle, in co-production with ARTE France, The New Life Company and Kwaï. Fremantle is the international distributor.
Niccolò Ammaniti is showrunner and director of the series, and co-writer with Francesca Manieri (Veloce come il vento, Il Primo Re, Il Miracolo, We Are Who We Are).

Anna will air in France in September 2021 (Read the French presentation here)

Niccolò Ammaniti

Niccolò Ammaniti was born and lives in Rome. He made his debut in fiction in 1995 with the novel Branchie. He is the author of award-winning novels and short stories, translated in 44 countries: Fango (1996), Ti prendo e ti porto via (1999), Io non ho paura (2001, Premio Viareggio), Come Dio comanda (2006, Premio Strega), Che la festa cominci (2009), Io e te (2010), Il momento è delicato (2012), Anna (2015) and La vita intima (The Intimate Life, 2023). In 2014 he edited the anthology Figuracce, which includes the short story Marco Risi contro la Maga della Maglianella.

Many of his books have been successfully made into films: L’ultimo capodanno (directed by Marco Risi, 1998); Branchie (directed by Francesco Ranieri Martinotti, 1999); Io non ho paura and Come Dio comanda (both directed by Gabriele Salvatores, 2003 and 2008), Io e te (directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, 2012). Following his work as author and director of the feature-length doc The Good Life (2014), Ammaniti has made his TV debut with The Miracle, a SKY original series for which he was showrunner, co-writer and co-director that also aired in France, Germany, Spain and UK. In 2019 Ammaniti received the Series Con Award. Ammaniti is also showrunner, co-writer and director of Anna, a Sky original TV series, based on the novel of the same name.

In January 2017, Niccolò Ammaniti has been awarded a honorary degree in Philology, Literature, and History.

 

“Ammaniti sets a new standard in post-apocalyptic fiction”
John Burnside, The Guardian (full review here)

“A powerfully disturbing and thought-provoking read.”
John Harding, Daily Mail (full review here)

“Complex, moving and sometimes downright scary, this one will stay with you long after the last page.” Sunday Telegraph Stella Magazine

“This unbeatable storytelling – an immediate and engaging study of humanity at its best and worst.”
Zoë Apostolides, Financial Times

“Compelling and moving”
Doug Johnstone, Big Issue

“Ammaniti has created a totally convincing Lord of the Flies-esque world and young Anna, endlessly resourceful amid the horror and chaos, is a heroine to root for.”
Alice O’Keefe, Editor’s Choice, The Bookseller

“A magnificently crumbling Sicily is the theater of these events. The Messina bridge is seen by Anna as a possible destination of a redemptive exodus, to be reached in the only way possible now – on foot.”
Michele Serra, la Repubblica

“The emptiness left by a parent triggers the opening of an emotional abyss that won’t be placated, if not through living it.”
Marco Missiroli, Corriere della Sera

“Ammaniti’s devotion to his protagonist brings him close to the compassion that Cormac McCarthy transmits to his creatures in The Road, recalling the atmosphere of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and the decadence of The Walking Dead, though without the carnage.”
Corriere della Sera

“Little savages fighting with the hostility of the world and the lack of role models, a world with new rules, absolutely unknown.”
Le Figaro Littéraire

“In this apocalyptic tale that borrows Bradbury and McCarthy, we find Ammaniti’s obsession for adolescence, that violent moment when a individual oscillates between the indifference and the dream of childhood and the unavoidable transition to adulthood. Like a demiurge, Ammaniti eliminates the “grown ups” from the earth, as it was a punishment for failing in their mission, and he gives Anna the opportunity for a new freedom.”
L’Obs

Foreign rights sold in:
Albania: Botimet Dudaj
Australia and New Zealand: Text Publishing
Brazil: Bertrand Editora Brasil
China: Shanghai 99 Reader’s Culture
Croatia: Vorto Palabra
France: Grasset
Germany: Eisele
Greece: Metaixmio
Kuwait and Middle East: Dar Kalemat
Macedonia: Antolog Books
The Netherlands: Lebowski
Serbia: Plato Books
Slovakia: Ikar
Spain and Latin America (Castilian): Anagrama
Spain (Catalan): Angle Editorial
Turkey: Can Yayınları
UK & US: Canongate

Italian and international editions

 

Foreign publishers of Niccolò Ammaniti’s works:
Albania: Botimet Dudaj
Australia: Text Publishing
Brazil: Companhia das Letras, Bertrand Editora Brasil
Bulgaria: Colibri
China: Shangai 99, Crown Publishing, Horizon Media
Croatia: AGM, Profil, Vorto Palabra
Czech Republic: Havran, NLN, Nakladatelstvì Lidové noviny
Denmark: Gyldendal
Egypt: Beba Editions
Estonia: Pegasus
Finland: Otava Publishing
France: Edition du Félin, Grasset, Laffont
Georgia: Sulakauri
Germany: Fischer, Reclam, Piper
Greece: Perugia, Kastaniotis, Metaixmio
Hungary: Ulpius Haz, Noram kiado, Európa Könyvkiadó
Iceland: Bjartur
Israel: Kinneret
Japan: Hayakawa Shobo
Korea: SeamulkiulSigongsa
Kuwait and Middle East: Dar Kalemat
Latvia: Jāņa Rozes apgāds
Lithuania: Tyto Alba, Alma Littera
Macedonia: Kultura, Magor, Antolog Books
Mozambico: Societade Ediotorial Ndjira
The Netherlands: Wereldbibliotheek, Prometheus, Lebowski
Norway: HR Ferdinand, Vigmostad og Bjørke
Poland: Muza
Portugal: Dom Quixote, Bertrand Editora
Portugal (Mozambico): Sociedade editorial Ndjira
Romania: Humanitas
Russia: Machaon, Inostranka, Atticus
Serbia: Plato Books
Slovenia: Goga, Študentska založba
Slovakia: Slovart, Ikar
Spain and Latin America (Castilian): Grijalbo, Anagrama
Spain (Catalan): Empuries, Angle Editorial
Sweden: Norstedts
Thailand: Butterfly Publishing
Turkey: Can Yayinlari, Doğan Kitap
UK: Canongate
US: Canongate US, Black Cat-Grove Atlantic
Vietnam: Phu Nu

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