‘I do have one regret’

There are no signs of a politician in the house. No photographs of important people shaking hands hanging on the wall; no leather office chairs behind a mahogany desk. Instead there is just a sofa, an armchair and a small table topped with a crochet doily. Then there are books all over the place, hundreds of them, on shelves, on the table, everywhere; and budgies in cages chirping away. These days, an old town house in a Birkirkara alley serves as the workspace for former Prime Minister and Labour leader Alfred Sant. He is the man who, before his last electoral defeat in 2008, had remarked in an interview with The Sunday Times of Malta that he had no regrets in his political life. As an established author in the Maltese language he does, however, have one regret. Before writing novels, he had started out as a playwright, but his theatre scripts were something he had to shelve as he was absent from the island for a whole decade and then political commitments took over. “I do regret having to give up drama. I used to love it,” Dr Sant, 65, says. He found writing plays – and award-winning ones at that – “uplifting”. “Or maybe ‘uplifting’ is not the proper description; it does sound...