Mill Town was shortlisted for the inaugural Inge Feltrinelli Prize to be delivered on March 8, 2012, in collaboration with the Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Foundation, the Feltrinelli Group, BookCity Milano, the Associazione Italiana Editori, and The School for Librai Umberto and Elisabetta Mauri.

More about the Prize:(translated from the Italian) To change the world, you need to tell stories. Collect and amplify the voices of those who investigate the despicable rights, act as a megaphone for the persecuted, the betrayed and silenced aspirations, the calls for help, to which the international community – by virtue of the consensus around indispensable principles of justice – should respond. To wake up public opinion by reminding us that culture can also play its part in acting as a witness, in moving consciences, in exercising a role of counterpower.

Inge Feltrinelli taught us this: culture creates bridges and opens gates; words and images are made to travel, to communicate the most remote points in the world. Telling stories is a way of not giving in to the existing, of making a commitment to the world.

Queen of international publishing with a German accent and icon of Italian culture, before she was a publisher – to survive the deprivations of the post-war period – Inge Schönthal Feltrinelli was a journalist and photographer around the world, becoming in no time – thanks to her determination and her courage – an established photojournalist. In the fifties she spent a long time in the United States where she had the opportunity to portray politicians such as John Kennedy and Winston Churchill; writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Günter Grass; painters such as Picasso and Chagall. Coming to Milan, since 1960 not only has she opened the doors of the publishing house to anyone who wanted to be heard, with human and intellectual intelligence, but,

One of the lessons that Inge Feltrinelli leaves us in legacy – noted the writer Richard Ford – is the rejection of conventional points of view. The idea that art and politics live in symbiosis is part of the same continuum. Books, stories, images are naturally made to break in, to bring fields of experience closer together, to engage in civil battles. Insisting on raising public awareness around the issue of fundamental freedoms, promoting new authorial capabilities and spreading new looks at the world through the words of the Inge Feltrinelli Prize. Telling the world, defending rights wants to represent a tribute to the figure of Inge Feltrinelli.