The National Book Council has just finalized the evaluation of Malta Book Fund applications and it is proud to announce the selected applicants (see below). The Malta Book Fund is an initiative launched this very year by the National Book Council, in a bid to subsidize publications of high cultural value, publications which could very easily remain unpublished if unfunded due to their specific nature. The Fund also helps authors and publishers exhibit and promote their work abroad.

Seeing as Malta’s book market is limited, publications of high cultural, literary and academic value run the risk of being overlooked and denied publishing opportunity by local editors and publishers due to restrictions and limitations of the market in which they participate. The Malta Book Fund is targeting this very problem by acting as a cultural subsidy for projects which may not necessarily be self-sustainable.

The NBC believes that with time, the Malta Book fund will help create a corpus of extremely high quality publications, a body of work which may very well be amassed into a wide-ranging catalogue of works when more and more proposals are elected for subsidy. In a sense, one may go so far as to assume that subsidy by the Malta Book Fund will become a stamp of prestige for the books in question.

The evaluation process followed the regulatory document published in both Government Gazette as well as the NBC’s official website. The adjudicators were Aleks Farrugia, Prof. Charles Mifsud and Prof. Henry Frendo, who formed an independent sub-committee administered by Mark Camilleri (Exec. Chairman NBC).

Applicant	Title of Project	Amount (€)
Geoffrey Saliba	“Malta’s top ten – A guide to the Island’s Wildlife”	€4,000
Malta Historical Society	“The 1565 Great Siege, the Founding of Valletta and their lasting effects”	€1,000
Mark Anthony Sammut     & Walid Nabhan	“Rendition into modern Maltese (with annotations) of M A Vassalli’s translation of ‘Is-Sultan Ċiru’ by Frans Sammut completed by W Nabhan and M A Sammut”	€2,500
SKS	“Dun Kixott mill-Manċa – by Pawlu Montebello”	€5,000
Midsea Books	“Minn Tfuliti sa Irguliti: rakkonti minn Leli ta’ Keterin ta’ Lino Psaila”	€5,000
Midsea Books	“Kif Dieb il-Gamiem: rakkonti ta’ kaċċa u nsib mill-passat ta’ Natalino Fenech”	€5,000
Arnold Cassola	“Malta-Sicily, people, patriots, commerce (1770 – 1860)”	€2,400
Michael Refalo	“Fatima on Her Way. Transhipment of Ottoman Slaves through a British Colony in the Late Nineteenth Century”	€4,500
Glen Calleja	“’The Outstaring Truth’: promotional tour in Romania”	€2,000
Toni Aquilina	“Translation into Maltese of ‘Malta Ħanina’ by Daniel Rondeau”	€4,500
Martina Caruana & Burkard Wehner	“The Wignacourt Psalter: An Art-Historical and Musicological Study”	€4,000

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