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maltatoday | SUNDAY • 23 JANUARY 2022 4 CULTURE Rena Balzan receives 2021 National Book Prize Lifetime Achievement Award PROF. Rena Balzan is one of the first Maltese women to lead a successful career in sci- entific research and over the past fif- ty years she has also authored novels and poetry collections for which she's been recognised with the 2021 National Book Prize Life- time Achievement Award. Her major psycholog- ical novels, published during the eight- ies and nineties, are known for introducing self-con- fident, independent female voic- es that parted ways with earlier stereotypical characterisations of female characters. At the University of Malta she read for an undergraduate Bachelor's de- gree in Pharmacy from which she graduated in 1968. Her re- search career kicked off with specialised studies in Genetics at the State University of Milan, Italy, followed by a PhD in Bio- tech- nology/Molecular Biology from Cranfield University, U.K. For several years, she was Asso- ciate Professor in Genetics and Molecular Biology at the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of the University of Malta where, at present, she is Senior Research Adviser. Rena Balzan was born in 1946 in Siġġiewi where she was also raised and attended primary school. Her interest in liter- ature and science coexisted from an early age. De- spite an unpopular choice for teenage girls at the time, by secondary school she knew she wanted to study sciences choosing phys- ics, chemistry and biology for further study. By that time she had also started dabbling in writing poetry and had been deeply immersed in Victorian literature having read many of the novels by Charles Dick- ens, Thomas Hardy and Emily Bronte. During the first years following the founding of the Moviment Qawmien Letterarju in 1967 Balzan was in the orbit of the literary movement while also taken up by her university studies - she published her first work, the Maltese-language po- etry and short-story collection Ilwien Moħbija (Veritas Press), a few years later in 1973. Her poems have also appeared in the anthologies Turġien (Gulf Publishing Ltd, 1983) and Al- fa (Union Print, 2000) and se- lections have been translated in English, French, Italian and German. The following decade Balzan published three novels start- ing with Fil-Firda l-Għażla (Gulf Publishing, 1981) dealing with the opacity of young love, Il-Ħolma Mibjugħa (Gulf Pub- lishing, 1982), and later Ilkoll ta' Nisel Wieħed (PEG, 1st ed. 1987, 2nd ed. 1998), a psycho- logical study of its female pro- tagonist, Nada, as she fights off unnecessary con- straints im- posed by her family and discov- ers the kind of life she wants to lead and the person she wants to become.1 With these novels Balzan introduced an array of mod- ern female voices advo- cating feminist viewpoints and a new and important chapter in the history of the Maltese nov- el.2 Her fourth novel, Fiż-Żif- na ta' l-Ibliet (Buġelli Publica- tions, 1995), is a coming of age novel exploring the pressures of changing professional and personal relationships against the backdrop of different cit- ies. A translation of Balzan's third novel by Antoinette Pace, Bonds in the Mirror of Time (Faraxa, 2014), has been pub- lished in Malta and the US. Critical appreciation of the novels in particular have seen Balzan as a major exponent of Maltese feminist literature in the eighties and nineties, re- lying on complex charac- ters and an observational eye re- calling her scientific disposi- tion. While reflecting about the relationship between sci- entific and literary sensibili- ties in Balzan's novels, Peter Ser- racino Inglott writes that, "the relationships among the characters are woven like the chemical elements that make up a biological cell, with the addition of mysterious fac- tors that heighten the intensity of the questions about chance and the statistically im- proba- ble results raised by evolution, even before the appearance of man."3 Oliver Frig- gieri also comments on Balzan as a nov- elist that narrates according to scientific sensi- bilities, "The extension of science into liter- ature results in a narrative that analyses, seeks to understand why, offers a formula, comes to a conclusion. The scientific method helps [Balzan] to de- scribe and define a character, and concurrently keeps her away from the possibility of al- lowing the novel to develop in another direction, includ- ing in the direction of contained, autonomous incidents." Throughout a distinguished research career she has pub- lished numerous scientific works in prestigious peer-re- viewed academic journals in- cluding Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Frontiers in Oncology, Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing), Biochem- ical and Biophysical Research Communications and oth- ers. Between 1997 and 1998 she served as Chairperson to the Malta Council for Sci- ence and Technology (MCST). Over the past decades she has been involved in nu- merous stud- ies funded by the MCST R&I Technology Development Pro- gramme focus- ing on the an- ti-cancer properties of aspirin on yeast cells and the mech- anisms behind it - research that Balzan hopes will help pave the way towards a better understanding of how aspirin prevents cancer in humans and contribute to the development of more effective drugs for can- cer prevention and therapy. The life and work of Rena Balzan will be celebrated dur- ing a dedicated special event organised by the National Book Council and held at the 2022 Malta Book Festival, giv- ing an opportunity to readers and the general public to meet the distinguished author and re- searcher. Rena Balzan (above)