ClareAzzopardi

Azzopardi’s theatrical works have elicited visceral reactions from the public, partly due to the immediacy of theatre as a medium. Her plays – of which one, L-Interdett taħt is-Sodda (The Interdict beneath my Bed, Merlin Publishers, 2010), has been published – are often political or are tinged with subtle social messages. One example is her stance on the gentrification of Valletta at the expense of local inhabitants in the more recent Tebut Isfar (Yellow Coffin, 2019). This reflection on socio-political issues marks Azzopardi as a writer with a social conscience.

She is perhaps best known for her second collection of short stories: Kulħadd ħalla isem warajh (The names they left behind, Merlin Publishers, 2014), which has been translated into English, Italian, Arabic, Slovenian, Hungarian and Croatian. The book, which won the National Book Prize for Fiction in 2015, consists of eight stories, each of which is about (and is named after) a different woman. The stories are linked by their thematic focus on individual women’s lives, their foibles and their struggles. They are fictions, but also, in a very fundamental sense, true stories, laying bare what is normally kept private.

A similar concern with the fragile boundary between the fictional and the historical is evident in some of Azzopardi’s other works, which are often embedded in socio-political contexts. Her novel Castillo (Merlin Publishers, 2018) is set on the Maltese Islands during the politically turbulent 1980s. This novel is a slight deviation from Azzopardi’s oeuvre, insofar as it includes elements of the crime/thriller genre. It also sets her apart from other writers in the Maltese literary scene, as this is a period in Maltese history on which comparatively little has been written. On the one hand, Castillo could be categorised as crime fiction (which would make Azzopardi, or at least her fictional character K. Penza, the first female Maltese writer working in this genre). At the same time, the author craftily weaves metafiction into the plot, thereby rendering her novel stylistically multifaceted, and entangling the fictional worlds of the crime novels in the book with the historical events unfolding in the country at the time.

Notwithstanding the socio-political concerns that inspire Azzopardi’s works for adults, she thoroughly resists a moralizing stance and approaches writing with a passion for experimentation. Aside from the contexts and eras within which her works are located, Azzopardi primarily remains focused on and drawn to individuals with their own unique stories, and it is the latter that imbue her work with personal, identifiable imprints. Ultimately, Azzopardi’s journey into writing also involves transcending time and space, creating opportunities for a more flexible, communicative relationship with her readers.