Camilleri Awarded Pepe Carvalho Prize

Eighty-eight year old Italian crime writer Andrea Camilleri made it clear that he still had plenty of writing left in him, after he received the Pepe Carvalho Prize for lifetime work at the BCNegra noir literary festival in Barcelona earlier this month (hat tip to Ngaio Marsh Award judge Janet Rudolph at Mystery Fanfare).

Camilleri was born and raised in Sicily and writes in a mixture of Italian and Sicilian. His novels are populated with a host of characters and settings, including corrupt politicians, illegal trash dumps, goat herders, the underground sex trade and, of course, the Mafia. Camilleri’s alter ego is Inspector Salvo Montalbano, the protagonist of more than a dozen novels published in English.

The Pepe Carvalho prize is named after the protagonist of the Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s detective novels. Camilleri named his protagonist after Montalbán.