Anglophone Linguistics and Literary Studies

4^th - 6^th September 2025, University of Basel

Author dialogues — Llanito meets Rumantsch — Academic papers —
Readings & performances

This is the third of a series of international conferences about contemporary Gibraltarian language and literature, the first having taken place at Cambridge University in 2023, and the second at the University of Vigo in 2024. Aiming to showcase the vibrant literary scene in Gibraltar, the conference will be devoted to the conditions of literary writing in Gibraltar as well as to the use, the development and the study of Llanito, a Gibraltarian local linguistic variety.

This summer is a great time to revisit Gibraltarian literature and culture, given that a post-Brexit deal for Gibraltar and its border situation has finally been negotiated.

Since our conference is held in Switzerland, we will take the opportunity to put Llanito in dialogue with Rumantsch, the fourth official language of Switzerland which is spoken in the Grisons and which, like Llanito, testifies to the cultural and linguistic hybridity of a border zone.

The conference programme comprises dialogues between literary authors and creative cultural performers, a podium discussion, traditional academic papers and inputs by scholars at various stages of their careers.

The conference is hybrid so as to give people a possibility to participate remotely, and free of charge, but registration is mandatory.

You can find a short recap of the conference – including photos – here.

Conference Guests

Jackie Anderson

was born in Gibraltar in 1964 and moved with her family to Kent, England, in the 1970s. She returned to her native Gibraltar in 2009 while retaining a base in her family home in Kent.
Jackie has won awards for her poems and short stories and is a well-known supporter of local writing in Gibraltar, having run workshops and other literary events for the local community in collaboration with Gibraltar Cultural Services and with other local writers. In 2018, Jackie was selected as a judge in Gibraltar’s annual poetry competition, and the following year was asked to work in a panel of editors to produce Gibraltar’s first ever anthology of Gibraltar poetry.
In 2022, the Medway Mermaids’ writing group published an anthology of selected works which included several of Jackie’s poems and short stories. She has also had a number of short stories published in Gibraltar's literary journal, the Patuka Press. In 2024, Jackie published a collection of poems inspired by her love and fascination for the sea, "Beyond the Blue".

Rebecca Calderon

was born into an English-Indian family in Hampshire in 1969. In 1990, she embarked on a trip to Europe from which she never returned. She settled in Gibraltar, where her social and political interests led her to write the play "The Civil Garrison" (2004), shown in 2015 under the title "Llévame Donde Nací". Her novel "Renault 5" was published in 2016, the short story collection "Ten Thousand Words" in 2021 and "Llévame Donde Naci - The Metamorphosis of a Play" in 2022. Calderon has won the Gibraltar Poetry and Short Story Prizes several times and was nominated for the international Bridport Prize for Poetry in 2015. In 2024, she edited "The Llanito Dictionaries". She is a sports journalist and organizes cultural activities in Gibraltar.

Josephine Cassaglia

is a proud Gibraltarian making her mark in the world of publishing. She works as Publicity Officer at Duckworth Books, one of the UK’s longest-running independent publishers. In this close-knit team, Josephine wears many hats—while her main focus is publicity, she collaborates closely with editorial, marketing, and sales departments, gaining a well-rounded understanding of what it takes to bring a book to life.
Josephine believes publicity is the beating heart of publishing—without it, books simply don’t reach readers. She’s passionate about shining a spotlight on authors and stories that deserve to be heard. Beyond her work at Duckworth, Josephine is actively involved with the Gibraltar National Book Council (GNBC), advocating for local authors and drawing on her London publishing experience to support Gibraltarian voices.
Her work is a perfect blend of passion, creativity, and community spirit—connecting stories with readers across the world.

Giordano Durante

is a bilingual poet and translator from Gibraltar. He was born in 1981 and studied in London. His first poetry collection "West" was published in 2017. His second collection "Machotes" (2020) deals satirically with certain forms of masculinity and his third collection, "Nostalgia Elsewhere", was published in 2022. Durante has performed at the Gibunco Gibraltar International Literary Festival and is co-editor of the first anthology of Gibraltar poetry. He is a founding member and co-editor of Patuka Press, a collective publishing Gibraltarian Literature, launched in 2022. He has also contributed to Radio Gibraltar’s ‘Pause for Reflection’.

David Levey

was born in London, studied in Warwick (UK) but has lived most of his adult life in Spain where he has been a university lecturer for almost 30 years. He is currently works at the University of Cádiz (Spain) where he lectures in Accents of English, Sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics. His research interests include accent variation, language contact and change, speech perception, language testing and evaluation and pronunciation pedagogy. As well as publishing books and articles on various aspects of language acquisition, he has written extensively on the language situation in Gibraltar. He is a key reference in the study of linguistic variation and English in Gibraltar.

Sophie Macdonald

holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Cambridge and an MA in Intercultural Communication and Applied Linguistics from University College London. She worked on code-switching in Gibraltarian literature and the threat to Llanito and presented her findings at the Cambridge University Gibraltar Conference. An excerpt, titled ‘In Defence of Llanito: Gibraltar in a state of linguistic transition’, was published in The Round Table. At the follow-up conference in Vigo, she spoke on language and decolonisation in Gibraltar. Sophie Macdonald is co-editor of Patuka Press, which has also published her short stories. The short story "Norfolk Square" won the 2024 Gibraltar Cultural Services Short Story Competition in the ‘Llanito’ category.

Gabriel Moreno

is a Gibraltarian poet and singer-songwriter who has published poetry collections in both Spanish and English. He studied Literature and Philosophy at the University of Hull and lives in London. His poems were published in major UK publications such as Omicron, Acumen and Annexe Magazine. He was Gibraltar’s Cultural Ambassador in 2022. Publications include "Identidad y Deseo" (Omicron 2010), "The Passer-By" (Mundo De La Cultura 2017), "Heart Mortally Wounded By Six Strings" (Patuka Press 2023) and "Nights In The Belly of Bohemia" (Poetry Mondays Press 2025). Moreno has released 4 studio albums, including "Wound in the Night".

M. G. Sanchez

studied at the University of Leeds, where he obtained a PhD degree in English Literature in 2004. He has published six novels – the latest being 'Marlboro Man', which appeared in in both bilingual and standard English versions in 2022. Over twenty articles featuring his writing have been published in scholarly journals and literary magazines, including well-know publications such as 'Wasafiri', 'Ariel' and 'Tvar'. He is regularly called upon to speak about his writing, having lectured at numerous British and European universities and been interviewed by the BBC World Service, 'The Times', 'El País' and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation among other media outlets. In 2024 he co-edited the volume 'Gibraltarians and their Language: Twenty-two Linguistic Biographies'. Former President of English PEN and two-time Booker Prize judge Alastair Niven described Sanchez in 2022 as “one of the most underrated novelists writing in English [today].”

Elena Seoane

is a Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Vigo and coordinator of the research project Variation in English Worldwide (ViEW). She earned her PhD in 1996 at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where she was a Senior Lecturer until 2011. Her CV can be found at lvtc.webs.uvigo.es/people/elenaseoane.
Her research focuses on three intersecting areas: Historical Linguistics from variationist, sociolinguistic, and corpus-linguistic perspectives; English for Specific Purposes, addressing specialized language use, the impact of democratization and colloquialization on different registers, and the role of register as a mediator of language change; and the cognitive and intralinguistic predictors of probabilistic morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes, including varieties spoken in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.
Currently, Elena is particularly focused on Gibraltar English. Her theoretical modeling of this variety will be featured in the 'New Cambridge History of the English Language' (2025), co-authored with team member Cristina Suárez-Gómez. Alongside her team, she is compiling three publicly available spoken and written corpora of Gibraltar English to examine key predictors of variation. Her research also explores the linguistic ecology of the territory and its rapid shift toward English monolingualism, marking a significant departure from its historically multilingual tradition.

Jonathan Teuma

(aka yanito_verso) is a poet, author and slam-poet based in Madrid who places particular emphasis on oral performance. He is currently a guest lecturer in English, translation and teaching at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. He is a founding member of Poetry Slam Madrid and Poetry Slam Spain. He has published two volumes of poetry, family memoirs and numerous journalistic texts and has worked as a columnist for Vox de Gibraltar. His PhD thesis, "Challenges in Poetry: From the Educational to the Dialectial", discusses how poetry can promote and advance dialects such as Llanito. The relationship between Llanito and identity is a central theme of Teuma’s work, and his charismatic performances embody Llanito in an impressive way.

Flurina Badel

is an artist and author. After initial training in journalism, PR and communication, she got her Master of Fine Arts degree at the Art Institute at the HGK FHNW in Basel and was a guest student at the Institute of Language Arts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since 2014, she has been working as part of the duo Badel/Sarbach. In 2019, she published the poetry collection "tinnitus tropic" (editionmevinapuorger), which was honoured with a Swiss Literature Prize in 2020. Flurina Badel is editor of the literary programme "Impuls" on RTR and plans and presents cultural events.

Gianna Olinda Cadonau

studied International Relations in Geneva and Arts Management in Winterthur. She has been responsible for cultural promotion at the Lia Rumantscha since 2010. Her poetry collections "L'ultima ura da la not / Letzte Stunde der Nacht" and "pajais in uondas / wiegendes Land" (editionmevinapuorger) were published in 2016 and 2020. She was awarded the Studer/Ganz Prize in 2022.

Ruth Gantert

is an expert in Romance Studies and works as a translator, literary mediator and editor. She is the artistic director of the Service de Presse Suisse, managing director of the Fondazione Casa Atelier Bedigliora and editorial director of the trilingual yearbook of Swiss literature Viceversa and the internet platform www.viceversaliteratur.ch.

Rico Valär

is Professor of Romansh Literature and Culture at the University of Zürich. He obtained his doctorate with a PhD thesis on the Romansh language movement, including its connection with the emancipation movements of other European regional and minority languages. Rico Valär has compiled critical editions on Peider Lansel, Jon Pult, Cla Biert and Clementina Gilly and is active in various commissions and juries at regional, cantonal and national levels.

Conference Organisers: Prof. Ina Habermann & Dr. des. Marta Rodríguez García.

Conference poster

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4th - 6th September 2025, University of Basel

Author dialogues — Llanito meets Rumantsch — Academic papers — Readings & performances