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maltatoday | SUNDAY • 23 FEBRUARY 2020 9 CULTURE LITERATURE THE 2020 Campus Book Festival will be benefitting from a greater international presence over pre- vious years. The Festival will be hosting three international guest writers and researchers from various disciplines, in collabora- tion with the UOM departments of Translation, Terminology and Interpreting Studies; English; and Philosophy. The public will have the op- portunity to engage direct- ly with the works of poet and memoirist Mark Doty, theo- rist and comparative literature scholar Prof. Susan Bassnett, and human information inter- action specialist Enrico Panai. Mark Doty is the award-win- ning author of nine volumes of poetry, three memoirs, and essay collections. Many of them, including the New York Times bestselling mem- oir Dog Years (2007), US Na- tional 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 Al- exandria (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 evoc- ative memoir of growing up gay in baby-boom America. As an accomplished poet of elegant, intelligent verse, Doty has of- ten been compared to James Merrill, Walt Whitman and C.P. Cavafy. Deep Lane: Poems (2015) is his latest publication, a collection of eight poems and a meditation on grief and fam- ily tensions. Doty is currently Distinguished Professor and Director of Writers House at Rutgers University. During the three days of the Festival Doty will be participat- ing in a number of events. On Wednesday 25 March he will be joining dramatist Tyrone Gri- ma and 'Kitba Queer' Project Manager Marthese Formosa to discuss queer representation in literature, and on Thursday he will be talking about the mem- oir Firebird with Dr Mario Aq- uilina and English Department students in a book club discus- sion. 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. Susan Bassnett is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick and an authoritative voice in the field of translation and compara- tive literature theory. She has published more than twen- ty academic books, including works on literary translation, criticism and Ted Hughes. She has explored translation as an exchange of cultural contexts, rather than a strict linguistic process, and sought to demon- strate the important implica- tions of translation studies for comparative literature, post- colonial studies and globali- sation. Bassnett has also con- tributed to current debates on British cultures, feminism, the- atre studies and poetry. Thanks to a collaboration the UOM Department of Translation, Terminology and Interpreting Studies, on Thursday 26 March at 10 am Bassnett will be speak- ing to Prof. Clare Vassallo on the way Translation Studies have evolved from the 80s and 90s through various turns. The National Book Council has been working closely with the Department of Philosophy on a discussion with Dr Enrico Panai from the University of Sassari, currently at the Uni- versity of Malta on an Eras- mus+ doctoral placement. He is a specialist in the Philosophy and Ethics of Information, was adjunct professor of Digital Humanities at Sassari Univer- sity, and is a consultant to large companies in the IT sector. He recently published Skip! The Art of Avoiding Projects: An Ecological Way of Living in the Information Age lays the ground for an innovative ecol- ogy of making or skipping pro- jects employing a multidiscipli- nary approach, using scientific discoveries and many exam- ples drawn from everyday life. On Friday 27 March, Francois Zammit will be interviewing Enrico Panai for a discussion on examples of applied con- temporary philosophy, particu- larly everyday challenges in the information age. For further updates on the ac- tivities mentioned and the full Festival programme, visit the National Book Council web- site, or the 2020 Campus Book Festival page on Facebook. The 2020 Campus Book Fes- tival is being held on Wednes- day 25 and Thursday 26 from 9am till 4pm, and Friday, 27 March from 9am till late in the afternoon. For more information con- tact Matthew Borg (matthew. borg@ktieb.org.mt) from the NBC, Romario Sciberras (gh- a q d a t a l m a l t i @ g m a i l . c o m ) from Għaqda tal-Malti – Uni- versità, and Matthew Cilia (desa.uom@gmail.com) from DESA. T.S. Eliot Prize winner Mark Doty among the international guests at Campus Book Festival 2020 Susan Bassnett Mark Doty