Renaissance roots

The literature of the new EU member states is a remarkable testimony to Europe's shared heritage, writes Julian Evans of the Guardian:

The words for "mother" and "writing" in Maltese are semitic, the words for "father" and "literature" from Romance roots. But 200 years of English influence have supplied Maltese culture with irony, understatement, nuance (and class snobbery). As a literary idiom Maltese superseded Italian in the late 19th century in the work of Dun Karm Psaila, a priest and Malta's national poet. Today, poets such as Immanuel Mifsud and Maria Grech Ganado write in Maltese and seek English translations; Mifsud is being translated by the Irish poet Maurice Riordan. The first literary novel in Maltese, Anton Manwel Caruana's social-political Inez Farrug (1889) was succeeded by a craze for Gothic tales with titles like Maria, or the Baron's Vengeance .

Maltese independence in 1964 may have liberated its writers finally to explore what being Maltese means - but until EU-supported translation funds allow them to be read in other languages, our best glimpse of Maltese life is in Trezza Azzopardi's unsparing but lyrical novel of a Maltese immigrant family in 1960s Cardiff, The Hiding Place.