The Night I Killed Kurt Cobain

Coming of age
Romance

Defining yourself also means losing something.

Italy, 1994. Frances, 17, blue-haired and sharp-eyed, is in love with words, music, and the photographs she takes to tell stories about what we see—and especially what we don’t. She’s also in love with Kurt Cobain. Or maybe with Zippo and Liam, her bandmates and closest friends. When they find out Kurt is in Rome, the three of them decide to hitchhike there and meet him. It’s not just about meeting an idol—it’s about escaping their small town lives and testing who they really are. The journey is messy, bold, and unforgettable. And what happens on the night of March 3, 1994, will forever change Frances’s world. Told through fragments of narrative, poems, and imagined photographs, this novel is a raw and poetic tribute to youth, longing, and the fragile beauty of growing up.

  • The ’90s, the passion for a legend, an idol.
  • The power of language. As in a diary or a personal album, every event is told in three ways: the narration of the events, photography with what we don’t see, and a poem/song written by the protagonist.
Publisher: Il Castoro
Target: Young adult
Year: 2024
Author
Azzurra D’Agostino

Azzurra D’Agostino was born and lives in a small village in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines. She has published several poetry collections—winning the Carducci Prize and the Ciampi Valigie Rosse Prize, and being shortlisted for the Viareggio-Repaci Prize—and writes for the theatre, both for adults and children.
She has published numerous picture books and edited When I Grow Up, I Want to Be a Poet, an anthology of poems written by children during workshops held across Italy. Her novels for young readers include The Garden of Wishes, Ghost Light – Emerging from the Dark Together, Cora in the Straight City, and The Night I Killed Kurt Cobain.
She also created the palmistry-inspired card deck Oracle of Destiny and edited the dreamlike-anthropological book Dreams and Symbols. In addition to writing, she leads poetry workshops for people of all ages.

Discover More

Other stories you might like