Glen Calleja
- Malta -
Glen Calleja (b.1978, Malta) is a writer, editor, publisher and interdisciplinary artist from Malta. He works with text, paper and books. His main interests are poetry as practice and the book as object and his artistic work often involves alternative book structures, found content and performative elements.
Calleja runs Kotba Calleja, a small press publishing house and artisanal bindery where he makes books using traditional techniques. He is also co-founder of Studio Solipsis, a cultural venue in Rabat (Malta) and co-founder and president of Fondazzjoni HELA which advocates for the Maltese literary sector.
Calleja has won various awards for his literary and artistic endeavours. His poetry publications include eki t'eki (2002), IR-RAĠEL (2010), kull flgħaxija kif mal-għabex tnin u tmut saħħet il-jum (2014), Iswed Assolut (2016) and SOMNVM (2024).
Improvising reveries: Glen Calleja
Glen Calleja is a writer and publisher from Malta. His work embodies a commitment to poetry as a mode of inquiry rooted in estrangement and play.
In his verse Calleja embraces associative thinking, abrupt tonal shifts, and, occasionally, surrealist logic. He is often colloquial. His words flow, revelling in the mundane and intimate, until an absurd or dissonant break displaces the reader. At times, dissonance and confusion precede more grounded images.
I woke up at two am to rid you
of a mosquito. And took a gulp of water
from the kitchen sink.
Snapshots are all we know of a year
that left us empty-handed.
(From I woke up at two am, trad. Albert Gatt)
His writing styles vary from book to book as do his thematic interests - love and cancer battles, fathers and masculinity, sleep and eternal rest, moral spectatorship and migration etc - but his voice remains consistent with a marked self-awareness and irreverent edge. Calleja is sensitive to the texture of language, its visual rhythm on the page, and to the breath patterns of spoken word.
At the heart of Calleja’s craft lies a deliberate refusal of tidy, linear narratives. Instead, he often constructs chaotic architectures of meaning modelled on the world he inhabits and critiques. His imagery emerges out of displacement and paradox—at once intimate and alien, clear and confounding. This aesthetic of fragmentary disorientation is not simply a stylistic choice but a deliberate attempt to destabilize meaning and liberate the poetic voice from the burden of narrative linearity.
In SOMNVM (2024), for instance, Calleja creates a poetic narrative around the history of sleep and eternal rest. The book is as fragmentary as a whole night of bad dreams and, just like such a night, the poem ends abruptly.
Over the years, Calleja has acknowledged the influence of various contemporary writers in his approach to poetry. More specifically, his experimental ethos finds strong resonance with the work of Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun. Like Šalamun, Calleja often subverts coherence in favor of associative leaps and absurd juxtapositions. Other strong influences include Joshua Beckman and some of the Flarf poets like Sharon Mesmer. Just like these poets, in Calleja’s poetry one finds improvisatory flashes and detours where he revels in the grotesque and the ridiculous as tools for satire and deep inquiry.
These days, his morning medicine’s strawberry-flavoured.
His voice
has changed, he’s become a more zealous
socialist, more of a prophet. He no longer
gargles Listerine.
(From He’s sexier your dad, trad. Albert Gatt)
In works such as Iswed Assolut (Pitch Black, 2016), Calleja’s post-conceptual work par excellence, where he delves into narratives of migration by sea, he employs iteration and variation throughout the book both for emphatic effect and for added nuance, colour, mood and tone: phrases twist subtly with each recurrence, as if each return reveals a different emotional register or epistemological stance. This use of phrasal variation gives the poems a droning and meditative quality—looping, revising, challenging comprehension while sustaining emotional resonance.
Similarly, in his cancer poetry, Every night (Kull flgħaxija kif mal-għabex tnin u tmut saħħet il-jum, 2014), Calleja resorts to list-making, another iterative technique, in a stream of consciousness exercise allowing the subject to unfold organically or chaotically.
a bouquet of white: ceramic
sink
strands of hair
soap and lather
rungs to hoist another moon
an empire of
trenches that swallow everything up
an all-consuming dew
dangling from clothes pegs
over me
and you a nurse of constellations
in the marble vein you chose in advance
mother mary
make me make peace with you
(From poem IV. Every night, trad. Albert Gatt)
Finally, Calleja’s role as an editor and literary activist is inseparable from his poetic practice. His work in small press publishing, interdisciplinary projects, and public poetry interventions reflects his belief in poetry as a participatory, social act. This is poetry not as product, but as praxis—an evolving relationship with language, audience, and place.
In 2018, together with co-author Marco Cremona, Calleja received the national book award for the ‘Biographical and historiographic research’ category with the book Sal-Quċċata tal-Everest (Merlin). His poem ‘RSVP’ placed third in the 2023 Doreen Micallef poetry contest organised by the National Book Council (Malta).
Poetry
-
I woke up at two am. / Fis-sagħtejn ta’ filgħodu
-
Her eyes speak freely. / Għajnejha jgħidu li jridu.
-
He’s sexier, your dad. / Mindu missierek ħalla d-daqna
-
Tumas keeps making up ads. / Doberman
-
Someone’s wife refuses to follow. / Il-mara ta’ xi ħadd
-
The government in your house. / Il-gvern tad-dar tiegħek
-
I. / I.
-
IV. / IV.
-
XIII / XIII.
-
Fragments from Pitch Black (2016) / Frammenti minn Iswed Assolut (2016)
-
Excerpt from SOMNVM (2024) / Silta minn SOMNVM (2024)
