As summer draws to a close, leaving behind memories of a healthily varied and active arts calendar for the season, it looks as though literature will lead the cultural scene into the Autumn, with the book fair, held at the Mediterranean Conference Centre between November 14 and 18, coinciding with the National Book Prize and more urgently, a dynamic Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival, organized by Inizjamed, happening as we speak at Couvre Porte in Birgu.
“The common dictum is that Maltese are not really readers,” Sergio Grech, who has recently been appointed as a full-time member of the National Book Council, says. “But if you were to see the 16,000 visitors we had [at the Book Fair] last year, you would probably find that difficult to believe. We think the Fair is doing its part to turn around any such dictum … indeed, all the efforts of the National Book Council are aimed at turning it round. We think the fair has found its place on the national calendar, and we couldn’t be happier.”
“I think people read more than we think they read,” Inizjamed’s Adrian Grima says. “I also think that they would read much more if the opinion makers, journalists. politicians, priests, artists, read more. In other European and Mediterranean countries, literature is part of the collective discourse.”
The Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival is a two-day event in which authors from various countries have been invited to present their work, all of which has been translated to Maltese.
Unfortunately, the Palestinian poet and journalist Fatena al-Ghorra will not able to take part in the Festival because Gaza has been closed for months by the Israeli army that has occupied the Gaza Strip and West Bank since 1967. This closure means that no one can get out of Gaza. Ms. al-Ghorra had a visa from the Maltese government to visit Malta for this event but she cannot leave Gaza. The Palestinian-Maltese writer Walid Nabhan has translated Fatena al-Ghorra’s poetry into Maltese from the original in Arabic and he read her work on the first night of the festival that was held yesterday.
The festival will end tonight with readings from Immanuel Mifsud, İpek Seyalıoğlu (Turkey), Walid Nabhan (Palestine/Malta), Samira Negrouche (Algeria), Valerio Cruciani (Italy), Adrian Grima. The Zizza Ensemble will end the night with a fusion of funk music and poetry. The event begins at 8pm and entrance is free.
Grech’s new appointment is somewhat of a historic moment for the National Book Council as he will be the first person employed to specifically to undertake projects that would help the advance the status of literature on the island. “The sky’s the limit. I just wish we had the money to reach it,” Grech says.