06.02.2009 19:15
Cannavò praises Barça’s football
Marc Parramón
Candido Cannavò and Roberto Saviano have received this year’s Vázquez Montalbán Award. Cannavò, winner in the Sports Journalism category, thinks that “Barça’s playing the most spectacular football in the world”.
In the midst of extensive security due to the threats received by writer, and, journalist Roberto
Saviano and with a heavy media presence, the V Manuel Vázquez Montalbán International Journalism
Awards have been presented in the Auditorium at La Pedrera in Barcelona.
Cannavò and ‘La Gazetta dello Sport'
The event was chaired by Catalan President José Montilla
and was attended by Joan Laporta and Anna Sallés, Vázquez Montalbán’s widow. The Sports
Journalism prize, from the FC Barcelona Foundation and Catalan Journalists’ Association, went
to much-respected 78-year-old Italian journalist Candido Cannavò who edited sports paper ‘La
Gazetta dello Sport' for almost twenty years.
On picking up his award Cannavò said that “sport is world heritage and it is important
that it does charity work like Barça”. As mentioned above, Cannavò also used this opportunity
to praise FC Barcelona for their spectacular football this year.
Committed journalist
The jury for the awards, which included Joaquim Maria
Puyal, Jordi Basté and Mònica Terribas, said in their citation that Cannavò deserved the prize:
“he is a sports journalist who is fully aware of the problems of society and has published a
number of books and articles setting out the situation in Italian prisons and about the disabled
and the day-to-day problems of the homeless”.
Cultural and political award for Saviano
Roberto Saviano, the author of ‘Gomorra', picked up the cultural and political journalism
prize. He said that “my readers are those who the criminals are scared of. The only way of
combating criminals is by joining forces at the cultural level”. The jury highlighted
“the extraordinary bravery of his denunciation of organised crime in Italy”. The prize
in this category came from the Catalan Journalists’ Association, 'Avui’, ‘El
País, ‘El Periódico de Catalunya', Grupo Planeta and Random House Mondadori.