The trio of winners of the Gianni Mura Prize

During the week of the ATP Tennis Finals, this column focuses on the ‘Gianni Mura’ literary prize, established thanks to the collaboration between Turin City Council, the Turin International Book Fair and the major tennis tournament, now in its fifth edition. The prize for the best book on sports literature – decided by a jury expertly curated by Federico Vergari and by readers via an online vote – went, in a photo finish, to Gianni Minà’s "Facce piene di pugni. Storie non solo di ring" (Minerva, 2026), edited by Loredana Macchietti and with a foreword by Isabella Rossellini. We had written about it here in Il Foglio Sportivo back in the spring, and we can only be delighted with the verdict, because there is something profoundly fitting about a prize named after Gianni Mura going to Gianni Minà – almost a baton pass between two masters (and, alongside Clerici and Brera, part of the most extraordinary pantheon of ‘Giannis’ that sports writing has to offer) who taught an entire nation that sports journalism is, first and foremost, literature. Before writing about boxing, Minà listens to it: a fact that comes across in his fifty or so portraits – from Jack Johnson to Ali, from La Motta to Marciano – where the boxers are men before they are champions, and the ring is the twentieth century embodied: migration, racism, dictatorships, the Mafia, redemption.

The special mention for the best work on tennis goes to Giulia Della Cioppa, La mancina (Bompiani, 2026), a coming-of-age novel that opens with a sentence that is already a weltanschauung: “Much of what I know I learnt on a court”. The protagonist takes to the court at the age of nine, accompanied by a father who has only ever watered and swept the courts, who repeats “I had teeth but no bread” and places upon her shoulders the talent he was never able to nurture. “They’re watching us from up there; your path is written,” he says from outside the fence, but she, inside, sees something quite different. Then come the academy, the junior tournaments, the rankings, and the scales every morning. Della Cioppa writes with geometric precision and overturns the fairy tale of the champion moulded by a parent: here, the only way to save oneself is by stepping outside the fence.

Finally, the ‘Fuoriclasse’ section, read, selected and voted for by students, awards the prize to Rosario Esposito La Rossa for "La tregua di Natale" (Garrincha Edizioni, 2025). Flanders, December 1914, the trenches at Ypres, the first winter of a war that was supposed to end in a matter of weeks. On Christmas Eve, decorated trees appear in the German and British trenches, Christmas carols ring out, and the following morning, men who had previously been firing at one another step out into no man’s land, shake hands, exchange tobacco and chocolate and… kick a football about. The students’ decision to select this particular book in a period marked by conflict is an act of faith in the transformative power of sport: the stubborn—and by no means naïve—idea that a football can still break through barbed wire. While adults continue to dig trenches, young people, thankfully, keep searching for a football.