TheresePace

She was born in Rabat in 1953. Pace studied at St. Therese College and went on to work as a videographer’s assistant. It was at school that she started writing poetry, and this love for writing stayed with her as she started and cared for her family, culminating in her first publication at the age of fifty. Her works have appeared in various magazines, journals and websites, as well as in numerous anthologies such as: Ilħna Ġodda, Ilwien fil-Kelma, Arkadja, A Surrender to the Moon, The Strand International Book of Modern Verse, Tra Le Parole e l’Infinito, Ad Haustum Doctrinarum, Il Viaggio, Sfumature, Antologia Nosside, Antologia del Premio Cluvium, I Silenzi delle Montagne e Le Voci del Mare, Sguardi e Voci Giovani sull’Europa and Antologia Tracce. Her work has been translated into English, Italian and Esperanto.

Literary projects she has participated in include: ‘Poetry in Motion’ in which one of her English poems was exhibited in the New York City subway; ‘Sguardi e Voci Giovani sull’Europa’; ‘100 Thousand Poets for Change’; and ‘TongueStories’ which revolved around the benefits of multilingualism. Pace has also won various prizes such as that for the promotion of the Maltese language in daily life, and the Doreen Micallef Poetry Prize in 2022. She placed first in the Italian competition ‘Poesia e Immagine’ (Cesena) and won the Premio Critica in ‘Tra Le Parole e l’Infinito’ (Caivano) as well as the Nosside World Poetry Prize.

Her first work, il-Leġġenda taċ-Ċurkett tat-Tieġ tal-Madonna (The Legend of Mary’s Wedding Ring), written in secondary school, remains her longest. It speaks about Mary’s ring, how it was passed from a gem merchant to his supplier, unravelling his life to become a lesson in appreciation. Rhyme and rhythm have always been important to Pace; indeed, when it comes to works for children she focuses her prose-poetry exclusively on this – as seen in Naqraw u Nirrimaw (Read and Rhyme) (2009). Ir-Re tal-Ġungla u s-Skiet Misterjuż (The King of the Jungle and the Mysterious Silence) (2014) speaks to children and their fears as the lion helps all the other animals face theirs.

Some works close to Pace’s heart are Arpeġġi (Arpeggios) (2003), which won the National Book Prize, and was her very first publication; Oratorju: Il-Qaddisa tas-Salib (An Oratorio: The Saint of the Cross) (2012), a poem put to music dedicated to St. Helen for the statue’s centenarian celebrations; and In Her Element (2014) which is a collection of poems in English. This collection includes the poem ‘Woman’ which won the Irish City of Europe poetry competition.

She has translated thirteen poems from Lucilla McLaren Spillane’s collection ‘Another Seeing and Other Poems’ (2013) from English into Maltese, as well as poems from Jonathan Balzan’s ‘Kilometri’ (2016) from Maltese into English. She translated two of Pier Paolo Paolini’s poems from Italian into Maltese, and used the English translations of Federico Garcia Lorca’s four part poem "Llanto por Ignacio" to translate into Maltese.

Pace enjoys experimenting with language. One of her projects, DiVersi, sees her take one of her sonnets and develop it into another fourteen. Pace’s latest still-to-be-published Maltese poetry collection revolves around love and life. Her memoir remains her work in progress.