The doyenne of Maltese literature
This year’s Malta Book Festival puts the spotlight on Lillian Sciberras, whose contributions to Maltese literary culture earned her the 2018 National Book Prize Lifetime Achievement Award. Interview by Ramona Depares.
How have you seen the Maltese literary scene evolve since the 1960s?
Like many of the Moviment Qawmien Letterarju cohort, I belong to the immediate post-war generation, born at a time when Dun Karm, Francis Ebejer, Rużar Briffa, Anton Buttigieg, and other distinguished names in the Maltese literary canon potentially still had years of writing ahead of them.
With deference to the writers who came before, the Moviment was a defining moment that for Maltese literature marked the leap into the global literary currents of the 20th century.
Evolution is of course an incessant process, and new authors continue to emerge and enrich the field of Maltese writing, sometimes quite rightly challenging the status quo and breaking new ground, even irreverently. Besides, there are now a good number of valid women writers who are breaking barriers and overcoming the obstacles that hampered those that came before.
To go back to older writers, a poet of great calibre like John...