I deeply respect Kevin Saliba’s professional integrity: it is abundantly clear that he puts his heart and soul into his translations of difficult literary texts into Maltese.

But my unstinted respect does not deter me from disagreeing with the approach of the latest National Book Festival jury, of which Saliba was the member who publicly defended the decision not to award the prize for the Best Novel because none of the entries made the cut. The jury seems to have expected Fernando Pessoa and were instead presented potboilers.

I think the jury was wrong, at least in part. This wasn’t a Nobel Prize jury; it had to decide to whom to award Malta’s National Book Prize.

Malta is tiny. If we’re lucky, we produce one international-standard author in a generation. (That’s what the five-million-strong Sicilians managed to achieve: three internationally-recognised authors – Pirandello, Sciascia, Camilleri – in three generations.) The rest will be forgettable. Not because they don’t try their best (as the jury seems to have implied) but because of demographics. Just like we (luckily) get only single-digit incidences of rare diseases, so do we (unluckily) get only single-digit occurrences of raw talent.

We should try to understand the publishing industry. The overwhelming majority of books published globally are forgettable, verging on waste of shelf space and readers’ time, produced for an illiterate readership (as Alberto Moravia had acutely observed) within the industrial revolution mentality.

So if the jury was expecting a new García Márquez or a new Auster, they would have done better to restrain their enthusiasm. They were asked to judge a tiny nation’s Premier League, not the World Cup. We’re all aware that many of our authors would be ignored by big foreign publishers if they were to submit their manuscripts abroad. This isn’t only the case of Malta.

Most authors from countries with non-literary languages face the same predicament. But this doesn’t mean that the best among Maltese authors who compete shouldn’t receive the prize.

The National Book Prize should be reserved solely for books in Maltese

The competition is not “The New Joyce” but the “National Book Prize of Malta” – which means that even if no new Umberto Eco is discovered, the best should still be rewarded.

That said, the members of the jury were only partly wrong, because there’s confusion as to the raison d’être behind the book prize, caused by the inclusion of the English-language fiction section. To my mind, if somebody wants to compete for English-language literary prizes, they should do so in England. From this perspective, Saliba and the other jury members are right: if the authors are competing on a world level – using the world’s lingua franca – then their work has to be of a world standard.

So this quirky thinking of the book council partly exonerates the jury members.

But still, the issue needs to be addressed.

There are only a handful of literary languages in the world, that is to say languages that have a literature that goes back to the dawn of the Modern Age, and English is one of them. All the other languages (including ours) are excluded from this privileged class, mostly for historical reasons.

The National Book Prize is meant to encourage literary expression but, more importantly, the use of the national language. Fiction affords a number of linguistically problematic situations (as Saliba the translator is surely aware of) for which authors try to devise solutions.

Being fiction, negative outcomes are not catastrophic (contrast with legal work, where muddled linguistic expression has serious financial, political, and human consequences). Fiction, therefore, offers the possibility to solve serious linguistic problems without paying a price in the real world. Fiction is a linguistic rehearsal for real life.

The National Book Prize should be reserved solely for books in Maltese. Because, through literature, authors find ways to express thoughts clearly, concisely, and precisely in the national tongue, which is then used in the legal and other spheres (judicially, notarially, legislatively, etc).

In other words, stop the English-language section (let those who write in English compete in England) and start awarding the prize to the good authors who write in Maltese, even if their level of literature needs further polishing.

Mark Sammut is the author/co-editor of a number of books on law, history and politics.