Karl Schembri is a novelist and poet, author of Il-Manifest tal-Killer and Passju Taħt ix-Xita, among others. A former journalist who left Malta in 2009 to work for a news agency in Palestine, his investigative journalism was among the first to uncover cases of institutional clerical paedophilia in Malta in 2003. His most recent novel, Eħlisna mid-Deni (Merlin Publishers, 2025) — built on devastating events from the author's own life — is a second-person monologue in which the protagonist kidnaps a monsignor and forces him to answer for his abuse, with consequences passed down across generations. It was described by critic Daniel Cossai as "the moment literature stopped being afraid," and by author Clare Azzopardi as the work of "the most courageous writer of his generation." Schembri lives in Nairobi, Kenya, where he works as a media adviser with the Norwegian Refugee Council, and is vice-president of PEN Malta.