Beyond the Book

Trezza Azzopardi was born in Cardiff, Wales, and lives in Norwich, on the East coast of England.  

As a little girl growing up in Cardiff, Trezza would listen to her Gozitan father recount tales and describe the heat haze in Malta.  Her first novel, The Hiding Place, published in 2000, is the story of a Maltese family living in Cardiff during the 1960s. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). It  has been translated into 14 languages. 

Azzopardi's family are from Gozo, part of the country of Malta, which consists of a number of islands, of which three are inhabited, in the Mediterranean sea, south of Sicily.
Malta was part of the British Empire from 1814 to 1964, when it became independent. It is now a key freight transshipment point, a financial center and a tourist destination; and became a member of the European Union in 2004. The official languages are Maltese (the only Semitic language written with a Roman alphabet) and English - making it a popular destination point for people from English speaking countries!

If the snow is piling up outside your door and it's still a long way to summer, you might want to take a few vicarious minutes browsing photos of Gozo!

This article is from the March 2, 2005 issue of BookBrowse Recommends. Click here to go to this issue.

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