The Varese Short Story Festival is a major event on the Italian and Swiss-Italian literary scenes.

During the days devoted to the Festival there are numerous events connected to the written word, music and cinema, suitable for both the young and not-so-young, whether specialists or amateurs.

The prize awarded in this Festival is the Chiara Prize, launched in 1989 in memory of the Luino writer Piero Chiara, who died in 1986. There are two categories of winner, the Chiara Prize and the Chiara Prize for Young Writers. The finalists in the two categories are selected by a jury of literary critics, with the winner decided by a “people’s jury” of two hundred readers.   

The Festival is followed a few months later by the award of the coveted Chiara Prize for the Career, launched in 1997 and supported by the AD magazine, for the first number of which Piero Chiara started a column called “La casa, la vita” (“Home and life”) which is still continuing in the magazine today.