Top writers and musicians from seven countries, including gritty Welsh novelist Niall Griffiths, Maltese iconic poet Victor Fenech, and Lebanese poet and novelist Hyam Yared, will perform at this year’s fifth edition of the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival being held between September 9 and 11, at the Garden of Rest, in Floriana.
All evenings will include live jazz or alternative music, a free glass of wine and food for sale.
Short films from the Zebra Poetry Film Festival, in English or with English subtitles, will be shown on September 9 and 11. They will be presented by Boris Nitzsche. Readings are meant for a mature audience and start at 8 p.m. Entrance to all events is free.
The poems and prose will be read mainly in Maltese and English, but also in the native languages of the participants.
The writers reading September 9 are Maltese novelist Ġużè Stagno; Sicilian poet, singer, musician and actor Biagio Guerrera; and Valter Hugo Mãe, the Portuguese poet and novelist born in Angola who has published seven books of poetry and three novels and is included in Best European Fiction 2010.
On September 10, readings will be by the Maltese poet Nadia Mifsud who lives in Lyon; Egyptian poet, novelist, journalist and photographer Youssef Rakha; leading Catalan writer Miquel Desclot; and the well-known Maltese poet Victor Fenech.
The writers reading on September 11 are award-winning Gozitan novelist and short story writer Pierre J. Mejlak; Lebanese Francophone poet and novelist Hyam Yared, who confesses that “I write in French with all the influences of Arabic in which I was born;" and the well-known Welsh novelist Niall Griffiths, who will also be interviewed by Albert Gatt.
According to The Times of London, any fan of Trainspotting will find Grits, the first of six novels published by Niall Griffiths, “persuasive, alarming and addictive;” the Scottish council estates of Irvine Welsh “seem like Toytown when compared with Griffiths’ Aberystwyth.’
Live music on September 9 and 11 will be played by Effie Azzopardi's jazz band and on September 10 by members of Plato's Dream Machine, with their traditional folk, punk-influenced numbers, melancholic ballads and drone-chants.
Inizjamed and LAF are also offering two two-hour workshops (in English) about writing for children by leading Catalan writer Miquel Desclot.
The workshop is open to a limited number of writers and non-writers interested in exploring children’s literature.
Those interested should write to clareazz@gmail.com .
The two workshops, which are free of charge, will be held in Valletta on September 7 at 5.30 p.m. and on September 9 at 10 a.m.
The festival coincides with the fifth annual Malta LAF Literary Translation Workshop, led by Alexandra Büchler, director of Literature Across Frontiers, during which the participating writers will translate each other's works.
Previous workshops have hosted writers from Algeria, Croatia, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Palestine, Portugal, Slovenia, and Turkey, who translated their Maltese colleagues’ writing into their languages and whose work was in turn translated into Maltese.
The first edition of this festival was held at St. James Cavalier in September 2006, and all other editions were held in Vittoriosa.
This year’s festival and literary translation workshop are the biggest to date in terms of participating writers and events being organised.
This annual international literary festival is being organised by Inizjamed and Literature Across Frontiers with the support of the Culture Programme of the EU, Din l-Art Ħelwa, Institut Ramon Llull, The British Council, Literaturwerkstatt Berlin, and Delicata Wines.
www.inizjamed.org