News that author Walid Nabhan is leaving Malta because he is no longer able to sustain himself here should dismay anyone who cares about our arts.

Walid is one of the leading figures in Maltese literature. He is a winner of the National Book Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature. His Arabic translations have been instrumental in bringing Maltese works to a wider audience. If someone of his calibre cannot survive in Malta, what artist can?

Nor is he alone. Most of the Maltese novels on many people’s shelves were written by authors who now live in Belgium and Luxembourg. Some of the most brilliant, talented, hardworking theatre artists now ply their trade in London, Edinburgh, or Amsterdam. We are witnessing an artistic brain drain on a generational scale. 

The reasons are not hard to fathom. In theatre, the best director in the country, working at our most prestigious theatre, is almost certain to be paid less than an electrician employed by the same theatre.

A less established actor would not be shocked by a government entity offering them a contract below the minimum wage. This is not a country that rewards the arts. 

Of course, nobody is owed a living as an artist. But nearly every developed country in the world agrees on a simple but quietly radical idea: that the arts may not always be economically viable, but they are vital to the soul of a nation and are therefore worth the state’s support. 

Malta agrees too: it is why we have arts funding at all. And if it were merely that our limitations of size and resources prevent us from sustaining any full-time artists, it would be tragic, certainly, but perhaps somewhat understandable. But that’s not our reality.  

We have the money. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to pay David Walliams €120,000 for one night at an awards ceremony boycotted by the best of the artists it was meant to celebrate. We wouldn’t be able to give Film Commissioner Johann Grech a €90,000 raise last year. We wouldn’t be able to sustain the raft of political appointees handed high-profile and high-paid positions in the arts as rewards for services rendered. 

Nor would we be able to programme a glitzy one-off €400,000 opera or a €3.8 million film festival, events that look great if you want to give the impression of a thriving professional arts industry, but that do precious little for the actual professionals trying to eke out a living in the same industry. 

Which all brings us back to Nabhan, whom a fraction of those fees would have been enough to sustain for years, allowing him to continue his wonderful contributions to our culture. 

Whatever else may be said on the subject, this is not about entitled artists needing to drop the pretence and get a real job. Artists are no strangers to doing whatever it takes to make ends meet. One study found that 90 per cent of actors in the UK are out of work at any given time, supplementing their income in schools, cafés, and offices. Nabhan himself had a laboratory job in dairy production. 

But a scenario in which a country’s best artists work only in whatever spare time they have after their jobs as copywriters and brand managers is hardly an aspirational one. If there is no prospect for even the very best to make a living, the brain drain is inevitable. The best will leave, to other places or other professions, and our country will be immeasurably poorer for it. 

If this were unavoidable, we’d call it a pity. But it’s not. Rather, the reality is simple and devastating: we are losing the best while we pay through the nose for the rest.