Aurora Leode Fadonougbo

Born in 1998 and raised in Milan, Aurora Leode Fadonougbo is an Afro-Italian writer, editor, and independent researcher with an academic background in linguistics and history. She writes and works across fiction, poetry, and critical writing, and her research focuses on diasporic emotional and political spaces, ecology, and spirituality from an anti-colonial perspective. Her short story "Lingua Padre" won Second Prize in the 21st edition of the Lingua Madre national literary competition, citing the following: "With strength and precision, the author stages linguistic conflict as an intimate and corporeal experience, avoiding any consolatory rhetoric. The story addresses generational and identity divides through tense and measured writing, capable of conveying the complexity of belonging without simplifications or stereotypes, yet with great delicacy. Affective alphabets suspended between distant worlds and silences that elude Western biomedicine." At its core remains the paradoxical sensation of mastering many languages ​​and, at the same time, feeling like a stranger in one's own. The subtle and touching reflection on linguistic and cultural belonging is conveyed through the father's incomprehensible song, which carries with it the memory of all that has been lost and recounts the atrocious drama of incommunicability. Until the final rebellion.