Pierre J. Mejlak
WINNER
WINNER

Biography
Born in Malta in 1982, Pierre J. Mejlak has been writing since he was young. Mejlak has written books for children, adaptations, a novel for adolescents and two collections of short stories, winning numerous awards, including five National Book Awards, the Commonwealth Essay Writing Award and the Sea of Words European Short Story Award.
His first collection of short stories for adults, Qed Nistenniek Niezla max-Xita (I’m Waiting for You to Fall with the Rain) was published to critical and popular acclaim in February 2009. His second collection of short stories, Dak li l-Lejl Iħallik Tgħid (What the Night Lets You Say), considered by most critics to be superior to the previous collection of short stories, was published in June 2011. One of the short stories included in the latter book, ‘Nixtieq Ngħajjat lil Samirah’ (‘I Want to Call Out to Samirah’) won the Sea of Words European Short Story Award.
A number of his short stories have been translated into English, French, Catalan, Portuguese, Serbian, Arabic, Spanish, Indonesian and Italian and were read at numerous literary festivals around Europe and the Middle East. Mejlak’s award-winning novel for adolescents Rih Isfel (Southern Wind) has been turned into a 13-episode prime-time TV series for Malta’s NET TV.
Nominated book : Dak li l-Lejl Iħallik Tgħid (What the Night Lets You Say)
Summary
The 10 stories in this collection, just like any self-respecting collection of medieval tales, are framed by a prologue and an epilogue. And some of the characters in the stories, like the bishop in ‘Il-Barranija’ (‘The Foreign Woman’) or the dying father in ‘Mort Naraha, Pa’ (‘I Went to See Her, Pa’), could easily have inhabited Boccaccio’s Decameron. In fact, the tension in many of the stories arises from the coming together of the past (or, at least, a previous way of life) and the present. Many of the narrators are travellers, moving from one point of their existence to another, trying to understand a life that they have lived but never fully comprehended, or trying to undo a part of the past that did not go according to plan. Very often their travels take them from metropolitan Europe to the periphery or the other way round, and these seemingly opposite worlds that have become so close in contemporary Europe serve as background to the lives of the different characters, who realize, or at least help us readers realize, that life is still lived at different rhythms in different parts of the world. In some parts, a person’s value is gauged by how often their mobile phone is changed for a newer model; in other parts, lovers have the luxury of waiting 45 days for a home-made liqueur to mature, a symbol of the time they have for each other and for each other’s stories. In fact, this could be read as a book about storytelling, not only as a form of pleasure that is shared between writer and reader, or narrator and listener, but more importantly as a gift that’s given with love and needs love to be appreciated.

Related publications
EUPL Anthology 2014
Various authors