Vouchers drive crowds to Book Festival, attendance double last year

The latest edition of the Malta Book Festival shattered last year’s attendance, thanks largely to a massive increase in government-issued book vouchers for students.

About 40,000 people visited the Malta Fairs and Conventions Centre (MFCC) in Ta’ Qali between Wednesday and Sunday for the festival, double the number seen last year, according to National Book Council executive chair Mark Camilleri.

Organisers and publishers alike attributed the unprecedented surge in visitors and sales to the government’s decision to issue a €20 book voucher to all primary and secondary school students, a significant jump from the €5 vouchers distributed in previous years.

Camilleri said over 15,000 vouchers were redeemed throughout the five-day festival, and leading publishers Chris Gruppetta, of Merlin Publishers, and Joseph Mizzi, of Midsea Books, said it was a big success for their houses in terms of sales.

However, they also warned that the government scheme only partly helped the ailing local publishing industry because most people spent the voucher on imported books, rather than those published in Malta.

The initiative was announced by Finance Minister Clyde Caruana during last year’s budget speech. Every primary, middle and secondary school student received a €20 voucher, which could be redeemed specifically at the book fair. The initiative was aimed at encouraging reading among young people.

A spokesperson for the book council also credited an aggressive new publicity drive for the high turnout: “We intensified our marketing efforts,” he said, highlighting the festival’s feature on the popular TV show MasterChef Malta the week before.

Cash injections

Merlin Publishers’ Gruppetta said their stand experienced “queues all weekend long”, pointing out their industry was among those that needed occasional cash injections to help keep it afloat.

Mizzi, of Midsea Books, similarly acknowledged the substantial boost in both attendance and engagement the vouchers brought to the event.

Gruppetta said Karl Schembri’s novel was particularly successful when it launched at the festival on Sunday evening.

The book, which explores themes of trauma and clerical abuse inspired by the author’s own family tragedy, was featured on Times Talk. By Sunday evening, it was Merlin Publishers’ biggest seller of the weekend, Gruppetta said.

He revealed that demand for the book was so high that they sold out all copies brought to the festival and were ultimately forced to turn several disappointed buyers away.

“We sold over 100 copies at the festival. It’s an absolute rarity for a Maltese adults’ literary work to sell that many copies. We were impressed,” he said.

The book, titled Eħlisna mid-Deni ("Deliver us from Evil") is a work of fiction with a plot that is quite simple: a man kidnaps an old, widely revered priest, ties him to a chair and forces him to listen to his life story.

The story is heavily inspired by Schembri’s real-life family tragedy; his father, who was sexually abused by a priest when he was a young boy, grew up struggling with severe mental illnesses and eventually killed his wife, Schembri’s mother, in a moment of insanity.

Schembri, an author, journalist and activist, finally broke a decades-long silence through the novel, telling Times of Malta the book was his way of achieving justice for a human tragedy the authorities systematically overlooked for years.

No bed of roses

Despite the encouraging turnout at the festival, however, both publishers expressed mixed feelings about the government initiative.

While the voucher scheme undeniably stimulated book sales, the majority of vouchers were spent on imported books rather than those published in Malta, they said.

Mizzi admitted he was “not ecstatic” about the situation, noting the scheme had inadvertently benefited foreign publishers more than the local industry.

This trend, they suggested, may be due to the dominance of English-language titles and the greater comfort many Maltese students feel reading in English.

They said the wider selection of imported English-language books naturally drew much of the voucher spending away from Maltese-language publications.

Gruppetta explained that Malta’s publishers have long been calling for financial support to strengthen the local book industry. He proposed that future editions of the voucher scheme be restricted to locally published books to ensure that the financial benefits remain within Malta’s creative ecosystem.

Praising the voucher scheme as a “brilliant idea”, he noted that “the British book industry did not need the Maltese money they were being given”.

This comes just months after both Gruppetta and Mizzi voiced concern about the government’s decision to produce and distribute free school textbooks. They warned the move risked “killing” the private publishing sector and could eventually lead to the extinction of Maltese-language books.