Immanuel Mifsud
WINNER
WINNER
Biography
Immanuel Mifsud was born in Malta in 1967, the youngest in a working class family of eight children. He has been active on the literary scene since the age of 16, when he started writing poetry and co-founded the literary group Versarti. He later founded several drama groups and also directed plays written by himself and by a variety of famous playwrights. He is a leading contemporary poet and fiction writer and some of his works have been translated and published in some European countries and the USA. His 2002 short story collection L-Istejjer Strambi ta’ Sara Sue Sammut (Sara Sue Sammut’s Strange Stories) won the Malta National Literary award and the same book was later nominated for the Premio Strega Europa prize. He has participated in prestigious literary festivals across Europe. Mifsud is a lecturer at the University of Malta, where he teaches modern Maltese poetry and theatre.
Nominated book : Fl-Isem tal-Missier (tal-iben) (In the Name of the Father (and of the Son))
Summary
Back from his father’s funeral, the narrator starts reading a diary his father kept during his days as a soldier during the Second World War. The diary is very scant, almost impersonal, but it is exactly this impersonality which pushes the narrator to re-examine the personal relationship he had with his father. The father, who the son knew only as a cripple after he had been injured in a motorcycle accident, had always tried to convince those around him that he was tough enough to withstand all hardship, and had tried to bring up his son in his mould. The narrator revisits his father’s past, as well as his own, to look for cracks in this façade, to find signs of weakness and displays of emotion. This turns out to be an opportunity to also look back at his own upbringing and especially at the way he had been educated to become a man. Episodes from the past are recalled and examined for any light they can shed on the matter. The narrator is not only older, which makes him attach new meanings to old events, but he has also changed in two other ways, which both influence the way he now sees things: he has just himself become a father, and he has become a scholar. He has read things that his working-class father would never understand, let alone know that they would be used to understand him.
Excerpts
Related publications
EUPL Retrospective Box
Various authors
EUPL Anthology 2011
Various authors