Leading Maltese poet and influential academic, Prof. Daniel Massa, was awarded the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award during this year’s edition of the National Book Prize. He was recognised for his lifelong career and remarkable contributions to Maltese literature.
The first Maltese academic to Head the Department of English, Prof. Massa, now 87, was Dean of the Faculty of Arts for several years, as well as founding Director of the University’s Centre for Distance Learning; and the communications programme, establishing the Centre for Communications Technology.
He was unanimously nominated by the National Book Council and the appointed board of adjudicators to honour him with this prize.
Reacting to the news, Prof. Massa said this award set the seal on work performed with dedication and love for Maltese literature. “I feel honoured, elated and very humbled… A writer does not have his eyes on prizes or awards. The aim is to write in such a way that it withstands the test of time… Waking and sleeping, chewing over it until you get it just right…. and if not, discarding it."
His well-loved poem, ‘Delimara’ is just one example of his superlative work in both Maltese and English. His debut poetry collection, Xibkatuliss was published in the late 1980’s and he also contributed to various poetry anthologies such as Kwartett (1960), Analiżi ’70 (1970) and Limestone 84 (1978) together with Victor Fenech, J.J. Camilleri and Mario Azzopardi among other acclaimed poets of his generation.
Prof. Massa’s poetic output quickly established him as a landmark poet in Malta’s literary canon because of his engagement with the postcolonial legacy and the political realities of the nation, but also due to his memorable depiction of the sea filtered through an islander’s psyche. For readers and critics alike, Prof. Massa’s name is synonymous with the sea. In a study on Prof. Massa’s work, Prof. Adrian Grima has noted that on a political level, the sea in his poetry serves as an alternative motherland while lyrically, Prof. Massa’s poetry, with its rich imagery, vocabulary and sensuous rhythms is very similar to the sea.
His 2015 work, Barefoot in the Saltpans, is a poetry collection that includes revisions of poems which were originally written in Maltese, in English. In his foreword to the volume, award-winning British writer Jim Crace applauds his “exceptional skill at writing in English with the intimacy of a native speaker without stifling the cadence and percussion of his home language”.
In 1985 and 2005, he adjudicated and chaired the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize respectively. More recently, in 2013, Prof. Massa published a 900-page biography of Peter Serracino Inglott, PSI Kingmaker (Allied Publications).
His full bibliography may be accessed online.