Book of the month - The 1960s swing

As the saying goes: If you remember the sixties, you weren't there. Implying a decade of louche, hedonistic, drug fuelled behaviour, by mainly young people with too much money and too few morals.

So it may seem paradoxical to note that the 1960s was also one of the most creative decades of the 20th century. The music of the Beatles, the movies of Schlesinger, Truffaut et al, plus writers of the calibre of Osborne, Burgess, Updike etc...

And here in Malta we had our own 1960s cultural renaissance. This was the era of playwright Francis Ebejer, who single-handedly hauled Maltese theatre into the 20th century. The 1960s also spawned a crop of very talented poets and writers of the calibre of Oliver Friggieri, Mario Azzopardi, Victor Fenech, Raymond Mahoney and Peter Serracino Inglott. New Wave Literature In Malta is a slim volume by Charles Briffa, which pays homage to the outstanding writing talents that were to emerge from the 1960s in our islands.

Written largely in English, but with the poems and prose excerpts also appearing in their original Maltese alongside their English translations, this is both a tribute to the talents on show at that time and to their enduring qualities.

It could be argued that such an outstanding bunch of wordsmiths warrant a deeper and more extensive book to be written on both them and the times in which they were writing. But this will have to do for now. Indeed, it is essential reading for anyone wishing to learn more about our very own artistic rebirth.