Two candidates from Malta have been selected to take part in the 2023/2024 Ulysses' Shelter 3 residency programme. Congratulations!

Ryan Falzon, a Maltese visual artist, published author, and art educator, explores contemporary duality, human interactions and conditions in his artistic output. His visual work is often abrasive and playful, and he is known for constructing narratives by arranging disparate images in a collage-like fashion, allowing the viewer to visually wander. Falzon's 2014-2017 oeuvre is a reference point in contemporary Maltese political art. With numerous solo and collective exhibitions in Europe since 2009, Falzon's works are present in public and private collections in Europe and the USA. Since 2011, Falzon has published several short pieces in various publications. His works have appeared in Maltese anthologies, and he is active in local literary circles. SAJF, the first novel by Falzon, was published by Kotba Calleja, Malta, in 2022. Several reviews have referred to SAJF as the voice of the Maltese millennial generation. SAJF is currently shortlisted for NBC 2023 National Book Prize.

Virginia Monteforte is an anthropologist, translator and photographer who studied at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at La Sapienza in Rome and earned a PhD in Social Anthropology and Ethnology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Besides being an author herself, since 2014 she has been working as a literary translator of poetry, prose and children's literature from Maltese, English and French into Italian. Among her published translations there are Terre Sospese by Elizabeth Grech (Capire Edizioni, 2019 - with Massimo Barilla), Il vizio del silenzio by Clare Azzopardi (Mesogea, 2022), Mikelin by Sandra Hili Vassallo and Noè e lo scoiattolo giocherellone, by Leanne Ellul (both published by Verbavolant in 2022). Since 2013 she has managed various community cultural projects about women, material culture, mobility, displacement, alternative cultural heritage and memory sites. She is the co-editor of Din mhix tazza (2013), Undertow. Poetics of displacement (2016), and the editor of the artbook To be defined (2018), which shares a name with an artistic exhibition she curated for Valletta Capital of Culture 2018 (Spazzju Kreattiv, 5th October- 4th November 2018). She has worked as a visiting lecturer at the University of Malta, a tutor of applied research projects for ISIT in Paris and served as a photographer for literary events since 2014. She is the keeper of two cats named after Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and loves taking underwater pictures of silence and fish.