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Fernando Aramburu opens on Wednesday the Book City of Milan, the most important literary and cultural meeting of the Italian metropolis, which Barcelona has chosen this year as a guest city. The author of Patria will receive from the Milanese mayor, Giuseppe Sala, the 'Sigillo della Città', the honorary seal of the Lombard capital in recognition of his career.

The literary event, which this year celebrates its eighth edition, will open with a round table in which the Basque writer will reflect together with the Italian Paolo Giordano , author among others of the successful novel The loneliness of prime numbers , about tolerance, inclusion , integration and coexistence, which is precisely the name of the inaugural colloquium.

"Coexistence without losing sight of literature," says the writer in a telephone conversation with EL MUNDO. "Neither Paolo Giordano nor I are politicians so we will try to address an essential issue in the lives of human beings without losing sight of the fact that we are creators of texts, we access others through writing and, through it, we transmit our perspective about human behaviors. We are not going to theorize but share impressions about today's world and about Europe. "

A Europe that is living "very hectic moments", says the writer. "Brexit, the rise of the extreme right in some countries, Spain and its difficulties in creating a government ...". The Basque author, who has lived in Germany for more than three decades, acknowledges not being surprised by the rise of Vox in the last elections. "I live in Central Europe, where some center-right nationalist tendencies are not very different from Vox," he says. "There is a European current that splashes to Italy, Poland, Hungary ... and Spain is not out of the world. All these movements are connected. Perhaps the strange thing was that in Spain I had not yet awakened ."

Aramburu, winner in 2018 of the European Strega Prize, will receive the 'city seal' of Milan from its mayor, Giuseppe Sala, determined to turn the capital of the Lombardy region into an Italian cultural center. A recognition that the writer, who confesses to maintain a close relationship with the city, defines as "a sign of very intense hospitality."

After the twinning with Dublin last year, the festival has chosen Barcelona as a guest city, whose literary scene will be represented among others by Eduardo Mendoza, Josep Maria Esquirol, Marina Garcés or Jorge Herralde .

In total, more than 3,000 international authors will participate until next Sunday in the nearly 1,500 free events that will take place in theaters, schools, museums, prisons and even hospitals spread throughout the city, from the Castello Sforcesco to the peripheral neighborhoods of Corvetto or Giambellino. Africa will be this year part of the thread of the Milanese literary fair that will grant the special prize to the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Five rich days of events in which it will also be possible to see and listen closely to international authors such as André Aciman, Amin Maalouf, Amitav Ghosh, Robert Harris or the Nobel Prize winners, Wole Soyinka and Svjatlana Aleksievic.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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