Olimpia De Girolamo and Ivana Di Salvo

Foto: ODG

Olimpia De Girolamo was born in Naples, where she completed her studies in philosophy. She later specialized in theater and film languages. Since 2002, she has lived in Ticino, where she teaches Italian and serves as co-director and instructor at Agorà Teatro in Magliaso. Her theater monologue La Mar was a finalist for the Premio Donne e Teatro in 2017 and won the Premio Fersen in 2018. In 2021, she won the Opennet Prize at the Solothurn Literature Days with the short story Il primo scalino: l'assalto del passato, which later inspired her novel Tutto ciò che siamo stati (All That We Were), published in 2022 by Gabriele Capelli. In 2023, she received the Pro Helvetia Creation Grant for literary projects with the concept that became her novel Volontà, published in 2024 by Capelli. In the same year, she published a short story in the 18th edition of Viceversa Letteratura and another in the anthology Un Natale di Storie a Mendrisio (Capelli Publishing, supported by the city of Mendrisio). The French edition of her first novel was also released in 2024 under the title Tout ce que nous avons été, translated by Lucie Tardin for La Veilleuse Publishing.

Foto: Giulia Caramori

Ivana Di Salvo, born in 1989 in Palermo, lives in Basel. As Suzan-Lori Parks says: "Writing is like visiting an abandoned house inhabited by ghosts." I began writing at the Teatro degli Incontri in Milan, in the context of collective creation. I attended the Scuola Holden and am continuing my education with a Master of Arts (Creative Nonfiction, Theater, and Screenwriting). Along this path, I developed a desire to explore the genres of narrative prose and short stories. In my work so far, I have used a variety of languages. In Deriva (a play), Sulcis speaks Italian, while Teulada and Anna speak German, highlighting the incommunicability and distance from their homeland. In Mawazo (written in Italian, English, Swiss German, Swahili, and Ichibemba), which I co-wrote with Mbene Mwambene, each character represents themselves and speaks in their native language. When there is no single native language, the language shifts depending on the scene.