The 2020 Campus Book Festival will have a greater international presence over previous years, hosting three international guest writers and researchers from various disciplines, in collaboration with the UOM departments of Translation, Terminology and Interpreting Studies; English; and Philosophy.

Mark Doty

The public will have the opportunity to engage directly with the works of poet and memoirist Mark Doty, theorist and comparative literature scholar Prof. Susan Bassnett, and human information interaction specialist Enrico Panai.

Doty is the award-winning author of nine volumes of poetry, three memoirs and essay collections. Many of them, including The New York Times bestselling memoir Dog Years (2007) and US National Book Award-winning Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (2008), have been met with critical acclaim and a wide popular audience.

With his poetry collection My Alexandria (1993), Doty became the first US author to win the UK’s Poetry Book Society T.S. Eliot Prize. His second work of non-fiction, Firebird (1999), has been described as an evocative memoir of growing up gay in baby-boom America. Deep Lane: Poems (2015) is his latest publication, a collection of eight poems and a meditation on grief and family tensions. Doty is currently distinguished professor and director of Writers House at Rutgers University.

Susan Bassnett

Doty will be participating in a number of events. On Wednesday, March 25 he will join dramatist Tyrone Grima and ‘Kitba Queer’ Project Manager Marthese Formosa to discuss queer representation in literature, and on Thursday he will be talking about the memoir Firebird with Mario Aquilina and English Department students in a book club discussion. Prof. James Corby will be sitting with the author for an interview on his life and work on Friday. Later that day Doty is expected to join the protest literature-themed open mic, organised with Inizjamed.

Prof. Bassnett is professor of comparative literature at the University of Warwick and an authoritative voice in the field of translation and comparative literature theory. She has published more than 20 academic books and has also contributed to current debates on British cultures, feminism, theatre studies and poetry. Thanks to a collaboration the UOM Department of Translation, Terminology and Interpreting Studies, on Thursday, March 26 at 10am Prof. Bassnett will be speaking to Prof. Clare Vassallo on the way translation studies have evolved from the 1980s and 90s through various turns.

Enrico Panai

The National Book Council has been working closely with the Department of Philosophy on a discussion with Enrico Panai from the University of Sassari, currently at the University of Malta on an Erasmus+ doctoral placement. He is a specialist in the philosophy and ethics of information, was adjunct professor of Digital Humanities at Sassari University, and is a consultant to large companies in the IT sector. His recently published Skip! The Art of Avoiding Projects: An Ecological Way of Living in the Information Age lays the ground for an innovative ecology of making or skipping projects employing a multidisciplinary approach, using scientific discoveries and many examples drawn from everyday life. On Friday, March 27, Francois Zammit will be interviewing Dr Panai on examples of applied contemporary philosophy, particularly everyday challenges in the information age.

For further updates and the full festival programme, visit the National Book Council website, or the 2020 Campus Book Festival page on Facebook.

The 2020 Campus Book Festival is being held on Wednesday, March 25 and Thursday, March 26 from 9am till 4 pm, and Friday, March 27 from 9 am till late in the afternoon.