Anita Raja is an Italian literary scholar, translator and key mediator of German-language literature in Italy. She specialises in the translation of important German-language authors into Italian, especially in the field of modern and post-war literature. She has also been shaping cultural exchange between Italy and the German-speaking world for decades through her work in libraries, as a publishing scout and as a journalistic voice. Born in Naples in 1953, Raja studied literature in Rome. At the end of the 1970s, she began working in the library system of the city of Rome and at the same time worked as a translator from German into Italian. She established central works by Christa Wolf in the Italian-speaking world and also made texts by Franz Kafka, Ingeborg Bachmann and Georg Büchner accessible, as well as other voices in 20th century German-language literature, including less well-received authors from the GDR. Her appointment as founding director of the Biblioteca Europea in Rome in 2005 was asignificant institutional step. She headed the library for over ten years and established it as a model project for a new form of European-oriented cultural mediation. In 2008, she was honoured with the German-Italian Translators’ Prize for her achievements in the field of translation and German-Italian cultural exchange.
Justification of the award
Anita Raja is one of the most significant translators from German into Italian. Not only did she discover Christa Wolf and numerous other GDR authors for the Italian public back in the early 1980s, but she has also translated long-canonised works by Georg Büchner, Franz Kafka and Ingeborg Bachmann into Italian with great subtlety. Her decades of commitment as a librarian also reveal that cultural education is a special concern of hers. She has always been committed to making libraries a place of encounter that transcends class, age and educational boundaries. In 2005, she was appointed founding director of the Biblioteca Europea in Rome, which she managed for ten years. She has also made an outstanding contribution to German-Italian cultural exchange as a publishing scout and publicist.
