ClaudiaGauci

Published by Edizzjoni Skarta, Gauci’s debut collection self-confessedly contains the ‘soul’ of the young poet, who believes the collection to be a representative take on her 18 to 25-year-old psyche, with its latter half exploring a more ‘mature’ and sober trajectory of childhood reflection, relationships and mortality. The bilingual collection also stands as a testament to Gauci’s connection to the wider literary community that defines her and her work, containing as it does creative and translation-based collaborations with various local poets – the veteran Maria Grech Ganado being among them.

Prior to publishing Sekonda Qabel Tqum, Gauci has worked as a translator at the European Commission in Luxembourg as well as on a freelance basis. She currently teaches Maltese full-time at a private secondary school, while also teaching poetry criticism to sixth-form students on a part-time basis.

Gauci’s experience in translation would certainly have informed her latest large-scale project: the spearheading of the Poetry in Potato Bags initiative (2017), an international ‘poetry exchange’ through agricultural links between Malta and the Dutch-Frisian city of Leeuwarden, in collaboration with the literary NGO Inizjamed and Valletta 2018 – the entity then in charge of Malta’s capital city’s European Capital of Culture title for that year. Gauci was charged with translation and editing duties for the subsequent publication emerging from the project, Poetic Potatoes, which included poetry in Maltese, English and Dutch.

While working on a sophomore poetry collection, Gauci is also making her first foray into prose, which she claims will be an 'anthropological' view of her family. Eschewing the tag of memoir, Gauci aims to “shed light on what was common, hidden or taken for granted in a modest house where eight children grew up back in the 1940s and ’50s”.