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Dr Norbert Bugeja, a senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at the Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta has recently authored the critical introduction to ‘Tad-Demm u l-Laħam’ (Klabb Kotba Maltin 2021), a collection of fourteen short stories by Dr Steve Borg that marks Borg’s debut on Malta’s literary scene. Titled ‘Il-Vuċi tal-Ilsien-Art: Ftit Ħsibijiet dwar in-Novelli ta’ Steve Borg’, Bugeja’s introduction takes the reader through some of the salient characteristics that mark this new voice in the literature of Malta.
In his introduction to ‘Tad-Demm u l-Laħam’, Bugeja argues that the short stories shaping this collection bring about a creative reconstruction of the affinity between language, territory, urban/rural spaces in the context of postcolonial Malta — a complex relation that is mediated by the distinctive voice of the narrator as it emerges in Borg’s stories.
Referring to notions and critical approaches to national, regional and communal identification — and beyond — as these emerge in Borg’s short stories, Bugeja discusses the aesthetic-political bind that structures the anxieties and discursive tensions making Borg’s voice a relevant and indeed important one today for the unfolding of the twenty-first-century Maltese short story.
Steve Borg’s writing to date has, particularly through his sequence of research volumes ‘Il-Maltin — Għemilhom, Drawwiethom, Ġrajjiethom’, brought to the fore a wealth of documentation, based in ethnographic, historiographic and cultural-studies approaches to the understanding of Malta and its communities, with a view to unearthing and voicing hitherto underexplored stories, individual and communal trajectories. The stories in ‘Tad-Demm u l-Laħam’ mark a significant new phase in Borg’s work, now from a creative point of view.
Besides his scholarly publications in the fields of postcolonial and Mediterranean studies, Dr Bugeja is the author, most recently, of a third poetry collection in Maltese, titled ‘Insa li Mhijiex Hawn’ (Klabb Kotba Maltin 2021) as well as the short story ‘Għawma’, that has just appeared in the volume titled ’50’ celebrating the fiftieth anniversary since the birth of Klabb Kotba Maltin, and edited by Prof. Ġorġ Mallia.
Dr Steve Borg’s book ‘Tad-Demm u l-Laħam’ is accessible through this link.