The Duke

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026

Outside Vallorgana, a tiny, isolated village high in the foothills of the Dolomites, the ‘Duke’ lives in the villa of his aristocratic ancestors. The last in the centuries’ old line of the Cimamontes, he spends his days on his land and absorbed in the family archive, tolerated, if gently ridiculed by the villagers who are his neighbours. When he finds out that the village big man is taking timber from his land, he has a decision to make. Will he stay in his glorious, cerebral isolation or will he honour his ancestral blood and take action against this affront?

Matteo Melchiorre’s portrait of the idiosyncratic character of the Duke and the world of Valorgana is a sweeping feat of literary imagination. With the pace, panorama and plot twists of a great nineteenth-century classic, the breathless story of the Duke’s ensuing feud unfolds, asking some big twenty-first century questions about our relationships with privilege, the past, the natural world and each other.

Matteo Melchiorre was born in 1981. After working as a researcher at the University of Udine, Ca’ Foscari University, and the IUAV University of Venice, he has been the director of the Library of the Museum and Historical Archive of Castelfranco Veneto since 2018. His work focuses on the economic and social history of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, as well as the history of mountains and forests. The Duke is his first novel.

Antonella Lettieri is London-based translator working into English and Italian and collaborates regularly with Foundry Editions. She was the 2023 National Centre for Writing Emerging Translator Mentee for Italian and worked with Howard Curtis. She translated Maria Grazia Calandrone’s Your Little Matter, her translations have appeared in Asymptote and she was awarded the first prize in the 2023 John Dryden Translation Competition. In 2026 Antonella won the TA First Translation Prize from the Society of Authors for her translation of Your Little Matter by Maria Grazia Calandrone, and published by Foundry Editions.