Tell us something about yourself.

If I’m not doing anything else, then I’m either reading or writing. It was Miguel de Cervantes who first broke it to me that sleeping too little and reading too much might wipe out and eventually zombify your whole brain. So I’m just hoping the past 30 or so years have been a calculated risk. I also love swimming – but never after seven in the morning and always along some rocky stretch of coastline.

How often do you travel?

My body is transferred away from the island around nine or 10 times a year. But body and mind rarely share the same table. I could be back in Malta even as the brain cells still dote on some quaint corner of Cordobà. The eye stares at a Phoenician gold earring somewhere in deep Carthage, but the mind is already scouring elsewhere to find its counterpart. Is it lost in some forgotten alley in Izmir? In Beirut? In Valencia? Somewhere deep in the dreams of a Sardinian woman? Who knows?

Do you remember your first time abroad, and can you tell us about it?

Yes – and almost inevitably – Sicily in the summer of 1984/1985. I must have been four or five years old and I remember very little, except for the vague sensation of a giant, sweet-sprinkled scoop of vanilla ice cream on a biscuit cone somewhere in southern Sicily. It must have been Modica. I also remember an elderly man with a mop of flowing, white hair. Was he smiling at me or at the giant icecream? I don’t want to fix a definite answer to this. It scares me, so to speak.

Best holiday ever and why?

Rome, July 2004. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s ‘Old Friends’ gig just outside the Colosseum. A full, early moon. Via dei Fori Imperiali brimming with couples, old and young, holding hands. The Everly Brothers singing All I have to do is Dream. A scent of hope coming our way, all the way down from the Palatine Hill. The stone pines in the distance. The ruins aflame, almost physically responding to Kathy’s Song. Just 12 years ago. Perhaps we were still in time to tell ourselves, back then: “Yes, this can be our Europe, a human Europe, and reality and dream, fact and aspiration, can somewhat coincide.” Where goes Europe today? Okay, I’ll stop here – don’t wish to spoil your readers’ outing.

Which place would you never visit and why?

No place on earth deserves that thought, I think.

Best travel companion?

Desirèe. She loves the food I love, I’d typically want to go wherever she wants to go and so on. She reads up on any place we’re visiting – voraciously so – whereas I enjoy feeling through a place first and reading up later. Sometimes the two schools cross paths. What happens when that happens? Ahem. Next question.

Thoughts of arrival tend to spoil the crossing itself

And what’s the worst your travel companion could do?

The worst she has done so far is to mistake harissa for tomato paste and selling it to me as such. I shudder to think of what else she could achieve down that road.

What do you usually look for when you travel?

I look for the age of a place. I look for the faces of its people, the pitch and intonation of their words, the stray sigh. I seek the sounds and gauge the silences. The way a cigarette butt is flicked off the pavement. A sleight of hand. An expletive in ultraviolet, late at night just down the road from Istanbul’s Istiklal, now in mourning after the latest terror. Colour: The synthetic-leather football flaking off in an alley in a suburb of Fes. Poverty: her cuisine and her sons and her daughters and her homes and her eyes and her futures. I look for difficulty, for its poems and its essays. I look for politics, for the street-level, that is – the politics of joy and the politics of anger, the hope and the despair and the resilience.

The perfect holiday would be?

Always the one yet to come. I have, in the past, tried hard to follow on from an address at a conference or reading at a literature festival with a few days of downtime. The formula doesn’t work because one ends up gauging the raw influence of a new place upon oneself. And taking notes, writing. You walk out onto a street, wind up unexpectedly at a midan or an internal garden, a market, a patio, a courtyard, a suburban watering hole – it will be enough to tamper any thought of a whole day stewing on some pool-deck. Having said that, if ever I get an invite to read my poetry in St Barts, I might not dismiss it offhand.

What’s the furthest you’ve been from home?

Geography is not my forte – Texas? Seoul? Jakarta? The latter, probably.

Package tours or DIY?

DIY, anytime. Though I’ve been dissing package tours for so long that I’m slowly starting to long for one.

What the best travel advice you can give?

At the risk of sounding corny – dissing every journey, however, long or brief it is, can mark a beginning without destination. Seek the impact of what is unknown to you. Feel it, then think about it. After that, dare yourself to open the history books.

And what’s the worst piece of advice you’ve been given?

To think of a place in terms of just one single object, or site, or dish, or experience, or person, or expectation, that “sums it up”. There is no such thing as the fantasies churned out 24/7 by the industry. A place is like a book... it will affect you one way right now, but heaven knows how you’ll relate to it 10 years or so down the line. Which also prompts me to take Lao Tzu’s advice – make no intention of arriving. Thoughts of arrival tend to spoil the crossing itself.

Flying – hate it/love it/neutral?

I can work miracles with my reading/writing on a short-haul flight. I find long haul flights physically daunting and unproductive. But I have to say I enjoyed playing Street Fighter II again after a 25-year break: on a Frankfurt-Busan flight!

The one place you never get tired of visiting?

Andalucia.

Describe one memory that stuck with you from a place.

On the train from Meknes to Fes in Morocco, an elderly chap boards the train, dragging a huge sack behind him. I couldn’t make out what it contained, but whatever was in it was alive and kicking very hard too. He tugged and tugged at the sack, but couldn’t squeeze it in through the train door. So he starts taking out its contents and handing them to us fellow passengers to carry all the way to Fes. I spent an hour holding down this charming, plump little hen in my lap. Upon arrival, the merry fellow stood next to the train door, held open the sack and cordially invited us to drop each species of fowl he had farmed out to us, roosters and whatnot, back into the sack.

You met the coolest people in... ?

The Cafe des Nattes (or Kahoua el Alia) at Sidi Bou Said and at the Kafe Ara in Istanbul. The former was and is a regular haunt of mostly European, Arab and American artists and writers sojourning in or visiting Sidi. The latter, a favourite haunt of Beyoglu youth, hipsters and assorted bohemians, was set up by veteran Istanbul photographer Ara Güler himself and exhibits his photography.

Your best budget tip to save money on holiday?

Sorry, wrong person.

If you actually had to live away from Malta, where would you pick?

I’ve spent many years in the dark north and in the UK and am in no hurry to indulge that weather again anytime soon. Anywhere on, or close to Mediterranean shores would do – Tangier, Seville, Cagliari, Marseille, Tunis, Alexandria, Izmir, Naples, Rome, you name it. But we’re conjecturing here. I’ll let you know once I’ve truly made up my mind.

What’s the one thing you would never do in a foreign country?

Try out any native word the meaning of which I’m not a million per cent sure of.

Anything on your travel bucket list?

Yes, but this does not depend on me, even though I work for it in my own modest ways. I want to live to be able to visit a Palestine that belongs to the Palestinian people. I want to read poetry deep in some wadi outside Ramallah with Bashir, with Mourid, with Tamim, with Walid, with Jihad – heaven rest his soul – in my thoughts. I want to recite Mahmoud Darwish’s poem After the Last Sky until I’m hoarse, until the valley returns its haunted verses to me unoccupied. I want to live to read out loud in a Palestine freed of the cement walls that break her.

Travel is important to you because... ?

It is not here and it is not now. Life is elsewhere, Rimbaud would say. And therefore I desire it.

What has travel taught you?

Strain all your senses. Listen till it hurts.

Where would you retire and why?

Retirement: a distant and hazy word. But I’ll endeavour to reply. I’d retire right here, where I’m answering these questions. Why? Because from where I’m seated I can see Kola and Karmenu chatting away before evening Mass. And this Merlot is a one-in-a-lifetime. And Desirèe is beautiful.