Erbgħin Jum by Antoine Cassar

Kenneth Scicluna reads from the twenty-ninth day and thirtieth night from Antoine Cassar’s Erbgħin Jum, a book-length poem.

The book moves through forty days and forty nights narrating long walks, real or metaphorical, inducing reflections on childhood trauma, depression and walking as self-therapy. It was awarded with the Malta National Book Prize for Poetry in 2018 and has been shortlisted for the 2020 Gdansk European Poet of Freedom Award.

The author

Antoine Cassar is a Maltese poet and translator. Besides Erbgħin Jum, he is the author of Passaport, a long poem printed in the form of an anti-passport for all peoples and all landscapes, has been published in eleven languages, and adapted for the theatre in Malta, France and Belgium. As a translator, Cassar has rendered the work of fellow Maltese authors into English (notably the short stories of Pierre J. Mejlak, 2014 EU Prize for Literature) and Spanish (Alex Vella Gera’s novel Troyano, published in May 2019 by Librosdementira).

About the reader

Kenneth Scicluna lectures at MCAST and at the University of Malta, makes films, and is a member of the European Film Academy.

If you liked Erbgħin Jum, you may want to check out Antoine Cassar’s:

Passaport: edizzjoni aġġornata (EDE Books, 2020)

Buy Erbgħin Jum here.

This episode is sponsored by the National Book Council.