OresteCalleja
Biography
Oreste Calleja is a veteran Maltese playwright. He has been active since the late 1960s, with works revolving around the Maltese experience and the impact of social and political decisions on everyday life. After a short stint writing in English, he started writing plays for the radio, stage and television in Maltese. He was one of the early members of the Moviment Qawmien Letterarju (Movement for the Promotion of Literature) and sat on the first editorial boards of the Sagħtar and Il-Polz magazines. He later also served as Treasurer of the Akkademja tal-Malti (Maltese Academy), and together with Trevor Zahra helped launch the Academy’s first website.
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Calleja was born in Ħamrun in 1946. He studied at the Lyceum and went on to St Michael’s Teacher’s Training College, where he obtained his teaching warrant. He then attended the University of London’s Birkbeck College. In 1990 he obtained a B.A. in Fine Arts and French from Jacksonville University (Florida). Back in Malta, he taught art in secondary schools. He also taught playwriting at the Malta School of Drama and the Academy for the Development of a Democratic Environment (AZAD). Later in his career he worked as a translator for the European Parliament in Luxembourg and also in Germany.
Calleja first emigrated in 1974, returning to Malta in 1991. Before his departure he published Erba’ Drammi (1972), a collection of four plays: Anestesija; Iġsma Iħirsa; Ċens Perpetwu; and Satira. These plays deal with the notion of tradition and its re-examination, its relevance. They brought to the fore the importance of theatre as a form of debate, which is a concept that would be revisited frequently in subsequent years.
Calleja won the National Book Award in the drama category for Pawlu Redux (1999), and Il-Festa bil-Bandieri (2002). Calleja's success as a dramatist has been mainly attributed to the way he peppers the realistic style with symbolic features that make his plays universal. His works often appear in the national curriculum of Maltese Literature for Junior College and University courses.
More recently Calleja came back to publishing drama, including plays for the stage, audio and screen. His most recent works are Ċama Ċama – il-Monologi (2019), a collection of monologues intended for actors and drama students, and Meta Jaħkem id-Dlam (2022), an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s “The Power of Darkness”. He is currently working on releasing a number of plays still in their editorial stage, including translations of earlier plays. Just like the plays of Francis Ebejer, Calleja’s works often depict characters in a state of turmoil – they aspire to be better, to grow, but are inevitably crushed by societal and psychological pressures. By tackling such universal themes, Calleja’s works become relatable, still retaining an uncanny complexity in the way they deal with the challenges of daily life.
Biography written by Ruth Bezzina
