Today sees the launch, within the Trade Books Area of the Mondadori Group, managed by Enrico Selva Coddè, of the Children’s Books Business Unit, which includes the publishing houses Mondadori, Rizzoli, Fabbri and Piemme with the Battello a Vapore and Geronimo Stilton brands.
The aim of the new structure is to consolidate, as well as further expand, the company’s leadership in children’s publishing.

The Children’s Books Business Unit, which will be headed up by Lorenzo Garavaldi, aims to enhance the various imprints in response to the challenges of a strategic and continuously changing market.

The new organisational structure, while maintaining the different positioning and characteristics of the individual publishing houses, will facilitate a more complete and coherent articulation of the offer. The skills, creativity and passion of the people of the publishing houses will guarantee the essential quality and innovation necessary to reach excellent results

The Editorial Director of the new Children’s Books Business Unit will be Enrico Racca and the heads of the various publishing houses – Patrizia Puricelli for Piemme Geronimo Stilton, Alessandro Gelso for Rizzoli and Fabbri Ragazzi, Marta Mazza for Mondadori Ragazzi and Enrico Racca (ad interim) for Piemme Battello a Vapore – will report directly to him.
Lorenzo Garavaldi will remain in charge of marketing.
Rights for the whole area will be managed by Laura Casonato, who is already in charge of rights for Edizioni Piemme and Sperling & Kupfer.
Press and Communications for the Children’s Books Business Unit will be overseen by Paola Caviggioli, who remains as head of Communications for Edizioni Piemme and Sperling & Kupfer.

Rizzoli Hires Eccles Fisher Associates

With effect from August 1st, Rizzoli, BUR and Fabbri Editori in Italy have appointed Eccles Fisher Associates as their UK scout

Founded in 1983, Eccles Fisher Associates Ltd is a literary scouting agency working on behalf of publishers from eighteen countries and a film and T.V. company

www.ecclesfisher.com

With 143 votes, La scuola cattolica (The Catholic School) by Edward Albinati (Rizzoli) has won the seventieth edition of the Premio Strega.
La scuola cattolica is a monumental work of one thousand-three hundred pages in which Albinati recounts the 1970s, starting from the years spent at a private school in the Trieste district of Rome, also attended by the authors of the notorious “Delitto del Circeo”, a widely covered crime committed in 1975 that shocked the whole country, that serves as a means to explore the world as a whole, focusing on key issues such as Catholic education, the Italian bourgeoisie, the relationship between males and females, the institution of the family, adolescence, sex, violence; money, friendship, revenge. Mixing real people with fictional characters, legendary teachers, priests, thugs, little geniuses and psychopaths, enigmatic young girls and terrorists, Albinati builds a powerful and unstoppable narrative that courageously and openly address the great questions of life and history, as well as showing the other side of things.

Albinati was born in Rome in 1956 where he still lives and teaches literature at the city’s Rebibbia prison, an experience he writes about in his diary Maggio selvaggio (Wild May) published by Mondadori in 1999. Among his most recent books published in Italy is Vita e morte di un ingegnere (The Death and Life of an Engineer) published by Mondadori in 2012 and now available in the Rizzoli Vintage series.