Opinion | Sunday, 04 January 2009

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A personal vendetta against the National Book Council

The National Book Council refers to Mr Karl Schembri’s contributions about the National Book Awards, published in the Malta Today over the last few issues.
A negative tone was consciously and craftedly prevalent in the articles, painting a dark, very one-sided picture of what happened. Very few positive points of view were sought out and these were hidden very effectively among the negative ones. Even an interview with the chairman of the National Book Council that gainsaid the accusations, was headlined in negative terms, attempting to pre-empt a positive interpretation of the way he replied to all the queries that were used as a base for the attack by Mr Schembri.
This is a pathetic example of biased, yellow journalism – actually an exercise in how not to be reliable, and how not to do journalism, unless you have an agenda. The articles were a concerted attempt at deceiving those readers who have little or no knowledge about the award, giving them the impression that the National Book Prize has been a chaotic series of mistakes. We contest this in the strongest possible way. 
It might be important for readers to know that it is Mr Schembri himself who has a conflict of interest here. His book ‘Il-Manifest tal-Killer’ competed in last year’s National Book Prize. He caused a massive storm in a teacup when he did not even get a second prize. First prize had gone to Clare Azzopardi. His novel, Mr Schembri argued, was ‘censored’ by a priest who was on the adjudication board. Ironically, the priest, who has a Masters in Literature from Oxford University, had given him maximum points! Furthermore, he had felt offended and outraged that an anthology containing various writers, published by the National Council of the Maltese language, had scored more points than his book. This gives your readers a clear reason as to why Mr Schembri is leading a continuous vendetta against the National Book Prize.
We are very unhappy to have to say this, because we would rather respect the privacy of those authors who trust us with their works, but the persistent attacks on the Council by this journalist, are threatening to undermine work done by the Council that almost all of those (with no agendas) in the book publishing trade have accepted as being very positive.
Here I would like to rebut a number of the unfounded accusations made by Mr Schembri in his series of articles. The present regulations accept that anthologies of any nature can compete for the awards. In the case of the Bonnici anthology, a number of misconceptions have been evoked by Schembri’s articles. Mr Mario Cassar, who commented negatively on the book’s participation, was a member of the evaluation board which had the final and binding decision as to which category a book had to be placed or whether it was to be disqualified from participating. It seems that Mr Cassar did not manage to convince his colleagues in the adjudicating team to eliminate the book. According to the minutes of the adjudicating session, Mr Cassar and his colleagues did not choose to remove the book from the competition. They had the full power to do so if they wanted. The Executive Committee of the award has to depend on the decisions made by such adjudicating panels.
Bonnici’s book was not edited by Mark Sammut, but by an editorial team whose names are known since they were printed in the preliminaries. Mr Sammut is one of that team. 
The Council did not try to hide the names of the judges. They were up on the screen when they were being thanked by the presenter at the awards night – that is, a week before the first article appeared. When publishers and the journalists of Malta Today and Illum asked for a list of judges broken down by categories, this was readily sent to them by the Council secretary.
Every single step of the adjudicating process is transparent, and all those who participated can ask for a copy of the reports written by the judges about their own publications. This process was instigated by the present council for the sake of transparency. That is also why judges do their work separately from each other, so no undue pressure is placed on any by one or more of the others.
We have readily admitted to one slip-up in the present prize awards: the lack of awareness, until too late in the adjudicating calendar, of Mr Frans Sammut’s possible conflict of interest because of two of the books participating; but even in this we took steps so that no harm was done in the respective sections.
In the case of the Bonnici book, when Mr Sammut’s marks were eliminated from the addition, and the total of the two other judges were divided by two, then multiplied by three, so that there would be an equivalence with the judging of other books, the Bonnici book still came ahead of the book placing second by a number of marks. Mr Immanuel Mifsud, who spoke out against the winning by the anthology, actually gave the book a total of 60 marks. We were unaware of Mr Mifsud’s reservations about the National Book Awards, and were very surprised, on reading his words, as to why he actually accepted to be one of the judges.
In the case of the Esperanto book, the rules of the Prize clearly stipulate that when a book being judged is in a language that none of the judges are familiar with, an expert is appointed in each language on whose expert advice, the prize is awarded. The expert appointed by the Council in the case of the Esperanto book was Mr John Vella Bondin. His marks (when compared to other marks given by other experts to the other books in the category) were what gained Dr Carmel Mallia’s book the award.
All of this was well known to Mr Schembri, so it is a shame that he disregarded all of the explanations given, and went on to blow up the one possible mistake made by the Council into a series of articles that have all the undertones of a destructive personal vendetta. It is easy to shout “chaos” and very easy to create chaos, even if none is there to begin with.
Regarding the criticism that invitations were not sent to relatives of Guze’ Bonnici, the NBC’s policy is clear. Only authors and their respective publishers are invited. As regards any other issues, the Bonnici family will have to deal with the Ghaqda tal-Malti (Universita’), that won the prize for the editing of the book. 
We are also quite unhappy about the fact that Mr Immanuel Mifsud’s comments on the Malta Book Fair were the only ones run by the author of the piece. It seems that Mr Schembri has forgotten valuable lessons taught in journalism courses about double sourcing and countering.
All we can say about the Malta Book Fair is that in 2005 it was on the verge of dying, and after being revamped by the present Council, the Fair has been visited by an average 16,000 visitors per year, with all those participating quite happy with interest and sales. Cultural activities, including the launching of Mr Mifsud’s own ‘Rih minn Nofsinhar’ are regularly held. We are not saying that there is no room for improvement. Quite the opposite. An overhaul is actually planned for the next year, but sweeping statements like those by Mr Mifsud can only harm the process and not aid it.
It is amazing how all of the massive strides forward made by the National Book Council over the past few years in favour of the Maltese book were omitted entirely from the article and by almost all of those questioned in it. We will not list here what has been achieved, because all those involved in the book trade on the island are very aware of what has been happening. All of this has been achieved through perseverance, hard work and a limited budget 
Nor does Ms Clare Azzopardi need to demand that those on the council be accessible to those who want to question their activities, because that has always been the practice – throughout the council’s public fora, and in every single day of its existence.
We are also unhappy about Mr Paul Mizzi’s resignation from the Council. Mr Mizzi is well liked, and we have a massive respect for the work he has done for local publishing, but he was not a very participating member of the National Book Council. Nonetheless, we are not happy to see him go in a way that does little good to whatever he wished to change. He knows very well that whenever he made his rare suggestions the rest of the Council listened, and often changes were made accordingly.
The articles by your correspondent have done massive, possibly irrevocable harm, to the National Book Awards, the National Book Council, and, perhaps, as an indirect result, to the possibility of development in different areas within the propagation of book reading in Malta. We are a parochial lot, often acting on the premise of ruining the game we cannot play in and win. If that was Mr Schembri’s intention, and it seems clear that it was, then we can congratulate him on a job well done.

Sergio Grech,
Executive Director,
National Book Council

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