From Valletta to Għarb: How Audition and The Land in Winter Are Rewriting Malta’s Cultural Script

Between the honey-coloured bastions of Valletta and the salt-crusted fishing boats of Marsaxlokk, Malta’s readers have always turned to books as portable shelters from the midsummer glare or the January gale. Two recent releases—Michael Shurtleff’s evergreen Audition and Danish-American author Kirsten Klitgaard’s quietly devastating The Land in Winter—have slipped onto bedside tables across the islands at precisely the moment our own theatre and literary scenes are asking hard questions about identity, belonging, and the cost of leaving (or staying). In a country where the national anthem still pledges “Ħażina żgżira ħelwa” to every citizen, the resonance is unmistakable.

Audition, though first published in 1978, has been re-issued locally by Merlin Publishers with a new Maltese-English glossary of acting terms—think “qabża ta’ qalb” for “inner beat” and “nifs tal-istess kulur” for “the same colour breath”. At the Malta Drama Centre in Blata l-Bajda, tutor Bettina Paris has made the book core reading for the new intake of 23 students, many of whom still carry the memory of their first village feast pageant like a backstage badge of honour. “Shurtleff’s twelve guideposts mirror what we Maltese do instinctively at festa time,” Paris explains, gesturing to the makeshift rehearsal room once used by British servicemen in the 1950s. “We flirt with danger when we carry the statue, we court the crowd when we sing the hymn, we chase a ‘moment before’ every firework is lit. Audition gives our young actors permission to mine that lived experience instead of imitating Netflix.”

The ripple effect is already visible. During last month’s Valletta International Baroque Festival, a pop-up reading of scenes from Caravaggio—using Shurtleff’s techniques—sold out the Sala Isouard at the Manoel Theatre within 90 minutes. Ticket buyers ranged from 18-year-old MCAST performers to retirees who once trod the boards of the Astra in Gozo during the 1970s. In a country where amateur dramatics can feel like an extended family reunion, Audition has become the long-lost cousin who remembers everyone’s lines.

If Shurtleff offers a roadmap to performance, Klitgaard’s The Land in Winter is its emotional counterweight. Set on a fictitious northern isle slowly emptied by emigration, the novel reads like a snow-dusted love letter to every Maltese family WhatsApp group lit up with the question “U ejja, when are you coming home?” Local book-club hostess Ritienne Zammit chose the title for her Sliema reading circle precisely because December arrivals at the airport were greeted with posters urging Maltese abroad to “Make Christmas Maltese Again”. “We cried into our timpana,” Zammit laughs, “because Klitgaard’s empty villages echo our own fears: what happens if the young keep boarding planes to London, Berlin, Toronto?”

Community impact crystallised last week when the NGO Kopin organised a bilingual discussion at Spazju Kreattiv. Actor-turned-writer Coryse Borg moderated a panel linking the novel’s depopulated landscapes to Gozo’s dwindling winter population. Farmers, hoteliers, and students debated whether remote-work visas could reverse the drift, while a 72-year-old former stevedore recited a poem in Maltese about “ħamrija li ma jkollhiex saħħa” (soil without strength). By evening’s end, a pop-up shelf at the adjacent bookshop had sold every copy of The Land in Winter—twice restocked from Merlin’s emergency stash.

Together, these two books have sparked something rare: a cross-generational conversation that moves from the footlights of the Manoel to the terraced fields of Għarb without missing a beat. In Malta, where geography is intimate and stories travel faster than the bus to Rabat, Audition reminds us how to stand in the light, while The Land in Winter warns what happens when too many lights go out. Between them lies the space where Maltese creativity has always thrived—in the tension between staying and leaving, between the warmth of a festa torch and the chill of an empty village square.