The witness of the cruelest barbarity committed in the Twentieth century, deeply steeped in that Middle-European humanitas, Norman Manea is a writer – today among the greatest of international literature – who “must be known” because, in the most humiliating condition that a “civilization” can offer an individual, the condition of the exile, he has managed to describe in his novels and his essays, with masterly power, the grotesque ghostliness of totalitarianism, transforming it into a sorrowful, tragicomic and tormenting metaphor of the human condition.

The prize is delivered by Claudio Magris.