Journalist and former literary editor of The Independent Boyd Tonkin takes a look at how Gibraltar has featured in literature and poetry over the years.

Gibraltar is only a small territory of 30,000 people but its position at the entrance to the Mediterranean and its varied history has made it a melting pot for culture. Gibraltar features heavily in one of the greatest novels ever written in English, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Molly Bloom remembers her girlhood in Gibraltar “the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens . . . and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls”. The territory also features, among others, in Anthony Burgess’s novel, A Vision of Battlements, Jules Verne’s satirical novel, Gil Braltar, Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, and in poems by Tennyson, Browning and Yeats.

Tonkin is a senior writer and columnist at The Independent and former literary editor of the newspaper. He has been a judge of the Booker Prize, the Whitbread biography award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the David Cohen Prize. He often appears on BBC arts and current affairs programmes.

The Hon Samantha Sacramento MP, Minister for Tourism, Social Services, Equality and Housing, HM Government of Gibraltar, will introduce the event.

The Gibraltar Lecture is delivered each year at the festival and takes the form of an address, an ‘in conversation’ or a debate. The lecture is devoted to matters of major cultural, historical or international importance, at the invitation of Her Majesty’s Government of Gibraltar. The inaugural Gibraltar Lecture was given in 2014 by Ben Okri. Last year’s lecture was given by Professor Frank Close.