Jonida Prifti’s Avant-Garde Poetry Makes Strega Prize 2025 Shortlist

Jonida Prifti, an Albanian-born Italian poet and multimedia artist, has been shortlisted for the 2025 Strega Poetry Prize with her collection "Sorelle di confine" (Marco Saya, 2024). The book stands out for its avant-garde texts that merge poetry and sound, drawing from her long experimentation with sonic and performative elements. Prifti (born 1982 in Berat, Albania) emigrated to Italy in 2001 and earned a degree in Literature from Sapienza University of Rome with a thesis on poet Patrizia Vicinelli. She has performed internationally, both solo and as part of projects Acchiappashpirt (with noise musician Stefano Di Trapani) and J A (with musician Eva Geist). In March 2025, she released the poetic/musical album "Annia" (Maple death + My Own Private records), derived from "Sorelle di confine." She was also a finalist for the 2024 Premio Pagliarani with her prose poem "A squarciagola." Prifti describes her work as inherently political, though she avoids explicit declarations, letting the poetry speak. She uses both Albanian (her mother tongue) and Italian, finding Italian richer for wordplay. Her sonic experimentation began in 2006, modulating her voice with rudimentary audio software while writing her thesis on Dino Campana, and expanded in 2008 after meeting Di Trapani. She sees words as part of an ecosystem of phonemes, where meaning alone bores her; she prefers to lose herself in the signifier.