Matthew Schembri
Self-Directed Residency
Matthew Schembri (b. 1993) is a multimedia artist, writer and poet based in Malta. He earned a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Digital Arts in 2017. Schembri won Divergent Thinkers 04 (2015), Shifting Contexts (2019), and was named The Young Artist of the Year in 2017 by Arts Council Malta. In addition to Malta, he exhibited his works and was awarded art and literary residencies in the US, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, France, Spain, Croatia and Finland.
Schembri’s debut novel, Stessi (2018), won The Literary Contest of Novels for Youth 2016, and with his first poetry collection, Ħassartek (2021), he received the Best Emerging Author award given by the National Book Council Malta in 2022. In the same year, he was one of the winners of the A Sea of Words writing contest organised by IEMed and the Anna Lindh Foundation. His work was translated into English, French and Croatian.