paul caruana galizia, welcome to hardtalk. thank you so much for having me. it is a great pleasure to have you here and, indeed, also a pleasure to read your book. you ve just published it a death in malta: an assassination and a family s quest forjustice, you call it. you ve worked on this book for a long time. it is six years since your mother was murdered. working on the book, do you feel you have come to understand her in a new way? a different way? yes. so the funny thing about the book was, i thought writing about her murder would be the very difficult thing, you know, for all the obvious and gruesome reasons. but in the end, what proved the hardest was learning about her life before the murder. in fact, before my brothers and i were born, so what made her a journalist, the kind of country she grew up in. and that was all new to me. and it made, for personal reasons, the book its own reward. and it was only once i learned about her early years that i understood why sh
is my guest today. what are the lessons of this tragic death in malta? paul caruana galizia, welcome to hardtalk. thank you so much for having me. it is a great pleasure to have you here and, indeed, also a pleasure to read your book. you ve just published it a death in malta: an assassination and a family s quest forjustice, you call it. you ve worked on this book for a long time. it is six years since your mother was murdered. working on the book, do you feel you have come to understand her in a new way? a different way? yes. so, the funny thing about the book was, i thought writing about her murder would be the very difficult thing, you know, for all the obvious and gruesome reasons. but in the end, what proved the hardest was learning about her life before the murder in fact, before my brothers and i were born so what made her a journalist, the kind of country she grew up in. and that was all new to me. and it made, for personal reasons, the book its own reward. and
to understand her in a new way? a different way? yes. so the funny thing about the book was, i thought writing about her murder would be the very difficult thing, you know, for all the obvious and gruesome reasons. but in the end, what proved the hardest was learning about her life before the murder. in fact, before my brothers and i were born, so what made her a journalist, the kind of country she grew up in. and that was all new to me. and it made, for personal reasons, the book its own reward. and it was only once i learned about her early years that i understood why she did the kind ofjournalism she did, and what drove her. had she been somewhat reticent about it in life? i mean, by the time she was murdered, you were in your late 20s. but ijust wonder how much you had talked to her about that really rather extraordinary decision she took as a very young woman, to get into writing and then into journalism. never, i m embarrassed to say. and i. you know, i guess i have a t
which she would create the country she wanted, the country she thought we should all aspire to. i mean, she was a pioneer in the sense that there really weren t outspoken newspaper columnists who used their own name, and that was a key thing. she chose to go by her own name. she was identifiable in this small island, where pretty much everybody knew everybody. yes. she became the voice of those who were deeply dissatisfied with the way malta worked. that s right. so, you mentioned that the population is small, half a million. when i was growing up, it was, of course, smaller. i remember the population being 300,000 people. and it s difficult to express just how stifling that can be and how difficult it makes it to write very honestly about people and events because you might be writing about someone s cousin, someone s son, someone s boss.