
Event details
- Wednesday | November 6, 2019 to Sunday | November 10, 2019
- 9:00 am
- Mediterranean Conference Centre
The Malta Book Festival is an annual cultural event held in Valletta, Malta. The Festival celebrates the wonder of books through a wide programme of family-friendly activities โ including book launches and presentations, poetry and literature readings, meetings with authors, dramatisations of literary texts, and conferences and seminars. The festival also offers extensive networking opportunities for professionals in the book world.
The Malta Book Festival currently has an attendance rate of 40,000 people and the participation of more than 40 exhibitors. For five days, publishers, book sellers and authors gather under one roof to make the most of this unique opportunity to promote and sell their books to the public.
The international flavour of the Festival has increasingly come to the fore with the inclusion of foreign participants. This year round, one of the highlights of the Festival is the opening conference revolving around the literary genres of sci-fi and fantasy. The conference will be led by a number of local and overseas authors. Among them is Loranne Vella, the Brussels based author of Rokit (Merlin Publishers) and winner of the 2018 National Book Prize. The foreign authors attending the conference are Malta-born Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Kali Wallace and Dave Rudden.
Danusan are keeping their appointment again with new shows based on the winners of the this year’s Terramaxka Prize.
The purpose of the Malta Book Festival is to promote reading and literacy while engaging visitors in discussions with both local and international writers and literature experts. It is free of charge and open to the public mornings and evenings, plus all day during the weekend. As a direct result of a bigger exhibition space, the Malta Book Festival doubled the attendance rate of students visiting the Festival for the morning activities compared to last yearโs edition, thus showing an increased popularity of the Festival with the younger audience.
The National Book Councilโs aim is to present an experience revolving around books and reading, adhering to a philosophy that provides age-appropriated learning. Therefore, apart from activities directed to school children during weekday mornings, a team of professional actors led by Antonella Axisa will adapt last yearโs Terramaxka Prize winners for the stage.
With regards to the renowned international author, tune in to the NBC’s news as the name will be revealed in the coming weeks.
Trending an increasingly strong participation of women writers over the past few years, the Malta Book Festival undoubtedly reflects a significant turn, away from the traditional male writers-dominated publishing scene in Malta. Female writers are increasingly giving voice to their characters and to women in the Maltese society, and contributing to shape the new local intellectual and literary scene. The Malta Book Festival welcomes people from all walks of life, and serves as an open and democratic space for authors and publishers to promote their work.