PEN Malta is being too heavy-handed with a National Book Council employee and focusing its efforts on the people who least deserve it. The National Book Council should by default safeguard the interests of authors, so such comments by an employee are unexpected, but they should also be taken seriously.
As the previous executive chairman of the National Book Council, only once did I witness an author try to exert undue influence on a panel of judges, and such cases are rare. But it is also true that we have a current executive chairman who is blatantly and openly abusing his position to target and discriminate against specific individuals. My successor, who is incredibly incompetent and unfit for purpose, was appointed as a joke given he bears my name. I’m also engaged in court cases against the National Book Council for material and quantifiable discrimination and will be proceeding with more cases in the future.
What is concerning for the industry as a whole is that the National Book Council has lost its autonomy and has been reduced to extreme dilettantism due to cronyism and spite. Nearly all Council members have resigned, and the Council is operating based on the structures I left with it, making no major changes whatsoever despite a major economic crisis that has befallen us since then. One of its latest communiques was a call for authors to submit short stories in exchange for $25 per story in flagrant breach of the National Book Council’s own Charter of Writers that demands a higher minimum payment.
It’s really tragic and gross how Labour has destroyed a cultural entity out of spite and corrupt interests, and they are doing the same thing on a national level with every state entity.
Website Editor
Historian and Publisher
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