Reserve your seat for the Taobuk Gala

On Saturday 17 June, at 9pm, the Gala Evening of the Taobuk Festival – SeeSicily will be staged at the Teatro Antico in Taormina. And it is already possible to book your place here free of charge to experience the excitement of an evening full of beauty, music and art that will climax with the presentation of the Taobuk Awards to Annie Ernaux, Azar Nafisi, Joyce Carol Oates, David Garret and David Quammen.

The Gala, broadcast on Rai1, will also be an evening of great entertainment with Garrett, a world-famous violinist, who will perform two ‘cameos’ together with the orchestra of Catania’s Teatro Massimo Bellini, conducted by maestro Gianna Fratta.

The Ancient Theatre – the birthplace and heart of the Mediterranean and for one night the stage for the much-awaited Taobuk Gala – is therefore once again the setting for the Festival’s major event, which, starting from the theme chosen for this thirteenth edition – Freedoms – will enliven Taormina for five days from 15 to 19 June.

Freedom soars on multiple trajectories, intertwining arts and branches of knowledge, including science and music.

In a world premiere, three internationally renowned writers will be simultaneously in Taormina to be presented with the Taobuk Award for Literary Excellence: the Nobel Prize for Literature Annie Ernaux, Iranian Azar Nafisi and American Joyce Carol Oates. Three female figures, far in their human and artistic journey and yet similar, linked by a sharp and inquiring writing and by their social committment.

As every year, the Taobuk Award for Science will be delivered. In 2023, the Taobuk Award for Science will go to the populariser David Quammen.

If Annie Ernaux, the author of masterpieces such as The Years, Happening and A Man’s Place, makes writing a political act for gender equality, Azar Nafisi, in her manifesto work Reading Lolita in Theran, launches a revolutionary cry that is at once a gasp of feminist pride, a glimmer of light and a plea for help against all totalitarianism and all forms of censorship. Thus, following the same paradigm, Joyce Carol Oates condemns the commodification of women and domestic violence in Wild Saturday, Beasts, The Female of the Species and Blonde.

David Quammen‘s production took on global resonance following the spread of the zoonotic pandemic, which he predicted in Spillover back in 2012.

From Taormina’s ancient cave, heterogeneous voices will rise, whose common thread is the hymn to freedoms, in a plural meaning to indicate its multiplying effect, a concept around which the 13th edition of Taobuk will be developed.