Dom Mintoff’s Autobiography Is Coming Out… And He Wrote It In English
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The daughter of former Prime Minister Dom Mintoff has confirmed that her late father used English to write his autobiography, which is currently in printing stage.
“My father wrote beautifully in English,” Yana Mintoff told TVM. “He started writing daily a year after my mother died and I remember him telling me that he wasn’t spending so much time at the beach so that he could have more time to write at home. I was working in the United States at the time, and he used to fax me eight pages every week and I would return them to him with my suggestions.”
The book, called Mintoff, Malta, Mediterra: Żgħożiti, will also be translated into Maltese.
Mintoff, who was Prime Minister between 1955 and 1958 and again between 1971 and 1984, is one of the most divisive figures in Maltese politics, but the autobiography is expected to show a personal side to him.
Yana Mintoff
Yana Mintoff said the book sheds lights on her late father’s youth, including his time studying at Oxford University and his return to Malta right before the Second World War.
It also includes his frustration at how the Catholic Church had strayed so far from the “revolutionary” teachings of Jesus and how he had left the Seminary against his mother’s wishes. In an interesting twist, it reveals how Mintoff had learned the art of public speaking from a Catechism teacher called Rożina and that indeed his first public speech was a sermon at St. Dominic Church.
Yana Mintoff said her relatives did their utmost to conclude her late father’s autobiography based on two criteria – that every word in the book is his own and that the book reflects his socialist principles of justice, equality and peace in the Mediterranean.