yard | bitħa is a poem by Matthew Schembri, translated into English by Antoine Cassar. It is taken from Schembri’s upcoming second poetry collection, l-idea ta' dar (notion of home).
The collection is constructed like a stroll through a house, where each room is a metaphor linked to the writer's biography or the socio-political context of his country of origin. The fourteen autobiographical poems in the collection tackle subjects such as the plurality of relationships, overdevelopment and nomadism.
This project is part of the subthemes Literature as a tool for social equality and Global unity and shared futures.
Author
Matthew Schembri
Matthew Schembri (b. 1993) is a multimedia artist, writer and poet based in Malta. He earned a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Digital Arts in 2017. Schembri won Divergent Thinkers 04 (2015), Shifting Contexts (2019), and was named The Young Artist of the Year in 2017 by Arts Council Malta. In addition to Malta, he exhibited his works and was awarded art and literary residencies in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, France, Spain, and Croatia.
Schembri’s debut novel, Stessi (2018), won The Literary Contest of Novels for Youth in 2016. With his first poetry collection, Ħassartek (2021), he received the Best Emerging Author award from the National Book Council Malta in 2022. The same year, he was one of the winners of the A Sea of Words writing contest IEMed and the Anna Lindh Foundation organised. His work was translated into English, French and Croatian.
