Francesco Piccolo won the 68thStrega book prize Thursday night with his bittersweet memoir oflife on the Italian Left, 'Il desiderio di essere come tutti'(The Desire To Be Like Everyone), published by Einaudi.

Caserta-born novelist and screenwriter Piccolo, 50, won byjust five votes over Antonio Scurati with 'Il padre infedele'(The Faithless Father), published by Bompiani.

It was the second near miss by Scurati who in 2009 lost toTiziano Scarpa by a single vote.

Last year's winner was Walter Siti with his seventh novel,Resistere Non Serve A Niente (It's No Use Resisting).

In 2012 the prize went to Alessandro Piperno withInseparabili (Inseparable). The Strega is perhaps the most high-brow of Italy's threebig book awards.

The others are the Viareggio and Campiello prizes.

Recent winners of the Strega have included Niccolo'Ammanati, Maurizio Maggiani and Sandro Veronesi.

Of these, Ammanati is perhaps the best known abroadbecause of his 2001 cult thriller Io non ho paura (I'm NotScared) which was turned into a 2003 film of the same name byOscar-winning director Gabriele Salvatores.

The Einaudi publishing house was founded by GiulioEinaudi, the son of Italy's first president, in 1933 andpublished some of Italy's best-known authors.

It was also the first house to publish Boris Pasternak'sDoctor Zhivago, in 1957, when the famous novel was banned inthe Soviet Union.

The Strega prize was founded in 1947 by author MariaBellonci (1902-1986).

Bellonci, best-known for her successful biographies ofhistorical figures like Marco Polo and Lucretia Borgia,wanted to encourage literary freedom of expression after itsrepression under Fascism.

The name Strega, which means witch in Italian, refers tothe prize's sponsors, producers of the famed yellow liqueurof the same name.

Past winners include Cesare Pavese, Alberto Moravia,Giorgio Bassani, Elsa Morante, Dino Buzzati, Giuseppe Tomasidi Lampedusa, Carlo Cassola, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi,Umberto Eco and Gesualdo Bufalino.

In the past, the Strega prize has been marked bycontroversy.

There have sometimes been rowdy arguments involvingpublishers and writers and even allegations of vote rigging.