May I, through the medium of your paper, publicly congratulate Prof. Oliver Friggieri for the honour, Al Merito della Repubblica Italiana, he received from Italian Ambassador Luigi Marras, on behalf of Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, for his academic contribution to the literary relations between Malta and Italy.

In addition to this, one should also see Friggieri’s achievement as a national author, a theme I developed in my book The Essential Oliver Friggieri: National Author of Malta (2012) which presents an anthology of his works in translation. This anthology projects a compact, coherent image of him as a relevant contemporary national author.

That is, as it embodies an image of some of the works most characteristic of him in English, the selection, with no particular arrangement in mind, tends to stabilise the sense among non-Maltese receptor readers of what constitutes the relevant literary output of Friggieri in a modern environment.