M. G. Sanchez

M. G. Sanchez is a Gibraltarian writer who has written over a dozen books on Gibraltarian identity. His works have been reviewed in literary journals in Europe and the United Kingdom and he has lectured at many universities.

Background Born in Gibraltar in 1968, Sanchez attended primary and secondary schools in the territory. Sanchez represented Gibraltar at international level in his youth, coming 139th in the 1985 IAAF World Cross Country Championships – Junior men's race. In 1995, Sanchez moved to the United Kingdom to study English Literature at the University of Leeds. He received a PhD in English literature a doctoral thesis on subject of anti-Spanish sentiment in Elizabethan literary and political writing. Sanchez is a resident of the United Kingdom, but he also made long visits to New Zealand (2004), India (2005‒2008) and Japan (2014‒2016). In November 2020 he was awarded the Cultural Ambassador Award at the Gibraltar Government's annual culture awards.

Literary career Writing in the New Statesman in early 2015, Sanchez stated that his intention as a writer and speaker was "to present a Gibraltar that feels more real and more tangible than the “contested territory" cliché that readers so often encounter in newspaper editorials." His book Past: A Memoir (2016) relates hardships his family endured during the 2013 Gibraltar border dispute between Spain and the United Kingdom. Sanchez also describes a walk he took in Gibraltar's Upper Town Area with the historian Nicholas Rankin.

Articles about Sanchez's work have appeared in British and American Studies, Il Tolomeo, Ariel, ES Review, Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, the Kervan International Journal of Afro-Asiatic Studies, the International Journal of Iberian Studies, the Journal of Mediterranean Studies, the Open Library of Humanities, as well as in books such as Ritorno a Babele: esercizi di globalizzazione and (Post)Colonial Passages: Incursions and Excursion Across the Literatures and Cultures in English.

Sanchez has lectured at the University of Salamanca, the University of Turin, the University of the Balearic Islands, the University of Portsmouth, the University of Strasbourg, the University of Barcelona, the University of Northumbria, the University of Granada, the University of Lisbon, the University of Gibraltar, the University of Malta, and King's College London. For an appearance at the University of Basel, Sanchez wrote an autobiographical piece entitled 'Fifty Years of Unbelonging.' He also participated in the 2017 Gibraltar International Literary Festival, delivering a talk entitled 'Representing Gibraltarianness.' During the 2018 event, Sanchez discussed his book Bombay Journal.

In December 2020 Sanchez was invited by the University of Barcelona to deliver the 21st annual Doireann MacDermott Lecture. His talk – 'Between the Colonial and the Postcolonial: Writing and the Creation of a Third-Space Identity' – was subsequently published in a special issue of Coolablah, the official journal of the Australian and Transnational Studies Centre at the Universitat de Barcelona.

Sanchez has also taken part in radio programmes, including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation show Late Night Live, the BBC World Service's The Cultural Frontline and Lletres Ebrenques with Emigdi Subirats i Sebastià.

Rock Scorpion Books In 2006 Sanchez co-founded Rock Scorpion Books, an independent publishing company that was run from the United Kingdom. Rock Scorpion Books specialised in publishing fiction and non-fiction which raised awareness about the British overseas territory of Gibraltar, which Sanchez had been told there was no market. The company ceased to exist in 2013. Several of their former titles are currently published by Createspace International. Works released through the company include Sanchez's Rock Black and Sam Benady's The Pearls of Morocco: Bresciano in Africa.