stejjer ta' nies koroh (stories of ugly people)
Immanuel Mifsud's first publication was a collection of 20 early short stories
entitled Stejjer ta' Nies Koroh (Stories of Ugly People). These stories, of
varying length, present the reader with a number of marginalised characters:
junkies, homeless, forgotten heroes, people looking for their lost families,
people grossly disillusioned with life. In most cases the stories are set against a background of crowded, busy, metropolitan cities, the narrator
definitely empathising with the drop outs.
Written in the late eighties, a time when Mifsud was beginning his physical journeys outside his tiny island suffocating with corrupt party politics, this collection is both a personal diary of the very first trips into the wilderness of the metropolitan cities he visits (mainly London) and the coming to terms with the Maltese reality of the 1980s, characterised by a rigid bi-polar party system which left no space for individual freedom.
Freedom, in fact, seems to be the only prerogative of the drop outs who tell their tales in his stories.