About

Adria Bernardi’s most recent novel, Benefit Street, was awarded the 2021 FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Award and published by The University of Alabama Press.
She has been awarded the Bakeless Prize for Fiction, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and the Raiziss/DePalchi Translation Award. Her publications include an oral history, a collection of literary essays, a collection of short stories, two novels, and eight translations from the Italian.

Featured Work

Benefit Street: A Novel

2022

A universal story of exile, of the refugee and emigrant, and all those displaced who can reconstruct lost place only by weaving a new fabric of imagination. Set in an unnamed provincial capital of an unnamed country, Benefit Street tells of a wide circle of friends—teachers, lawyers, missionaries, doctors, artisans—in a time of gathering and dispersal as war to the east threatens and constitutional rights are daily eroded by an increasingly authoritarian regime.

Other Works

  • Ubaldo de Robertis, The Rings of the Universe: Selected Poems (translation)

    2016

  • Cristina Annino, Chronic Hearing: Selected Poems 1977-2012 (translation)

    2014

  • Francesca Pellegrino, Chernobylove—The Day After the Wind: Selected Poems 2008-2010 (translation)

    2014

  • Dead Meander, essays

    2012

  • Raffaello Baldini, Small Talk (translation)

    2009

  • Rinaldo Caddeo, Siren’s Song: Selected Poetry and Prose (translation)

    2009

  • Openwork (novel)

    2007

  • Raffaello Baldini, Page Proof (translation)

    2001

  • In the Gathering Woods (short stories)

    2000

  • The Day Laid on the Altar (novel)

    2000

  • Gianni Celati, Adventures in Africa (translation)

    2000

  • Tonino Guerra. Abandoned Places (translation)

    1999

  • Houses with Names: The Italian Immigrants of Highwood, Illinois (nonfiction)

    1990

Awards and Recognition

  • 2021 FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize
  • 2014 Independent Publisher Book Bronze Award, essay/creative nonfiction, Dead Meander
  • 2007 Raiziss/DePalchi Translation Award
  • 2000 Drue Heinz Literature Prize in Fiction
  • 1999 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for Fiction

Press and Media Mentions