Oreste Calleja


Oreste Calleja is a Maltese playwright.

Biography

Oreste Calleja was born in Hamrun, Malta. He studied at the Lyceum Grammar School and St Michael's Teachers’ Training College. He attended the University of London, Birkbeck College in 1974-75, and in 1990, studied at North Florida University and Jacksonville University, Florida, from where he obtained a BA in Fine Arts and French in 1990. In the 1960s, Calleja was a committee member of the Moviment Qawmien Letterarju, and after a short stint of writing in English, he started writing plays for the stage, radio, and television in Maltese. For several years his plays have featured in Maltese Literature national curricula in high schools and University courses.
Two of his plays, Pawlu Redux and Il-Festa bil-Bandieri, won the Malta National Book Award for drama. In 2011, a review in the Times of Malta called Calleja a "neglected Maltese playwright". Following in the tradition of Maltese playwright Francis Ebejer, Calleja's works depicted characters who were aspiring to a greater life but who inevitably faced insurmountable social and psychological hurdles. His themcs are at once highly allegorical and ironic and … encompass a world both universal and local.

Plays