After Amos Oz in 2010, the Spanish author Javier Cercas won the second edition of the International Book Fair of Turin Prize with 2,388 votes (38% of voters). Second was the Algerian Assia Djebar with 2,136 votes, 34%, and third came the Indian Anita Desai with 1,749 votes, equivalent to 28 %. A total of 6,283 people voted, expressing their preference at the seven touch screen stations scattered around the Fair.

The victory of Javier Cercas was decided by the visitors to the Fair, journalists, speakers, publishers and exhibitors who preferred him to the two women writers. The names of the finalists had been selected in April by the Technical Jury made up of the Steering Committee of the Foundation for Books.

Voting finished at 13.00 on Monday 16 May, the last day of the International Book Fair. 11% of the voters were publishers present at the event, corresponding to 13% of all exhibitors. The remaining 89% of preferences were expressed by visitors to the Fair. The peak for voting was on Saturday 14 May.

The prize will be given in autumn at a location in Piemonte. On that occasion the winner will hold a series of meetings and lectures open to the public and especially young people.

The winner. Javier Cercas (1962), a narrator and essayist, a professor of Spanish literature at the University of di Gerona, made his impact on the general public in 2001 with Soldiers of Salamis, which recounts an episode in the Spanish civil war (an ideologue of the Falange, escaping through the woods is spared by an enemy soldier). The novel triggers reflection on history that goes beyond ideological contrasts, tackling individual and collective responsibilities, violence and mercy, justice and vendetta. Against all forgetfulness, Cercas calls on us to take responsibility to come to terms with the past completely, with absolute intellectual honesty, to understand the present. Thus in The Speed of Light a veteran cannot manage to wash away the stain of a massacre he committed in Vietnam; and the recent Anatomy of an Instant recounts in great detail the 18 hours of the attempted coup in Spain in 1981 by Colonel Tejero. In Italy his books are published by Guanda.