The Fire

“A choral reportage that starts from personal stories and broadens the story to the geopolitical context.” * Rivista Blam *“The only hope left lies with the younger generations; they are the only ones who still have a vision and can recount the story of our planet without prejudices. Cecilia Sala does precisely that, with great skill and passion, in this extraordinary book.” * Io Donna *

Cecilia Sala is a journalist, war correspondent, and podcaster. Her reporting has appeared in L’Espresso, Vanity Fair, and Wired. She has covered crises in Venezuela, protests in Chile, Iran, the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021, and the war in Ukraine. On December 19, 2024, she was arrested in Tehran by the Iranian regime and held in solitary confinement in Evin Prison, where she remained for three weeks before being released. Soon after been freed, she returned to reporting from the field, continuing to cover global conflicts and political upheavals.

Oonagh Stransky has been a translator of Italian literature for over 20 years. Some of the writers whose work she has brought into English include Pier Paolo Pasolini, Carlo Lucarelli, Giuseppe Pontiggia, and Roberto Saviano. Her translation of Domenico Starnone’s The House on Via Gemito was longlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize as well as the American Literary Translators Association 2024 Italian Prose in Translation Award. She currently lives in Italy.