Paolo Giordano (Italy)

Born in 1982, is an Italian writer. Because of his debut novel, “The Solitude of the Prime Numbers”, he became the youngest ever winner of Premio Strega. This novel was published in Georgian too in 2024 by Palitra L Publishing in Maia Turabelidze’s translation from Italian. Giorgadno’s latest novel, “Tasmania”, was awarded as Best Book of 2022 by ll Corriere della Sera. Giordano’s activity includes non-fiction, like “How Contagion Works”, journalism and reportage. He also works as a screenwriter (the HBO series “We Are Who We Are” and the movie “Drought”). Giordano has a PhD in theoretical particle physics and lives in Rome. His books have been translated in over 40 countries.

THE SOLITUDE OF PRIME NUMBERS
(Exerpt from novel)

Mattia was right: the days had slipped over her skin like a solvent, one after the other, each taking away a very thin layer of pigment from the tattoo; and from both their memories. The outlines, like the circumstances, were still there, black and well delineated, but the colours had merged together until they faded into a dull, uniform tonality, a neutral absence of meaning.
The high-school years had been an open wound that had seemed so deep that it could never heal. They had passed through them in a state of apnoea, he rejecting the world and she feeling rejected by it, and they had noticed that it didn’t make a big difference. They had built up a defective and asymmetrical friendship, made up of long absences and much silence, a clean and empty space to which both could come back to breathe when the walls of the school became too close for them to ignore the feeling of suffocation.
Then, over time, the wound of adolescence had healed. The edges of skin had come together in im perceptible but continuous movements. With each fresh abrasion the scab gave way, but then stubbornly reformed, darker and thicker. In the end a new layer of skin, smooth and elastic, had replaced the missing one. From red, the scar had turned white, and ended up merging with all the others.

Translated by Shaun Whiteside