In Kassia St Clair’s The Secret Lives of Colour, readers are invited to reconsider the way we view something we are surrounded by from birth, yet rarely stop to question: colour. Much more than pigments, colours reveal themselves to be protagonists, main characters even, of their own stories in St Clair’s charmingly researched and engagingly written book.
St Clair is a cultural historian, journalist and best-selling author, so I was pretty certain I was in for an entertaining evening at Teatru Salesjan, on what was the last night of Inizjamed’s Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival, an event which deserves a round of applause in its own right for all the effort and heart that goes into curating such a colourful annual programme of events.
As we all gathered in this intimate space, glass of wine in hand to watch St Clair be interviewed by researcher and scientist Joseph Caruana, I couldn’t help but wonder what artist Darren Tanti had up his sleeve, tucked away in the corner of the room left to his own devices. The intention for the evening was for the conversation between Caruana and St Clair as well as her book The Secret Lives of Colour to inspire Tanti, as the night unfolded.
What particularly struck me during the interview, was St Clair’s approach to writing, insisting her book is not written for specialists. Instead, it aims to make colour accessible and compelling to anyone curious about the world around them. From the outset, the author asserts that “colours are subjective cultural creations.” What the reader sees, and how we interpret it, is not set in stone but rather deeply intertwined within a historical context she often spends years unravelling. Place plays a significant role in shaping this perception also.
A particular shade of turquoise, for example, might evoke images of sun-bleached shutters and Maltese balconies for one person, while for another, it could recall tropical waters or religious iconography just because it reminds them of the house their grandmother used to live in. Colour is, as St Clair insists, personal. Memories, age, and lived experiences influence the emotional weight we attach to a shade, making it as individual as a fingerprint. By grounding her exploration in both fact and subjectivity, the author reveals colour to be a subject matter that resonates differently for everyone, yet connects us all.
Part of what makes this narrative so engaging is the author’s journalistic sensibility. With a background in writing for the likes of Elle Decor and The Economist to name a few, St Clair writes with a keen awareness of her readers’ time, attention, and curiosity. She understands the importance of selectivity: more importantly she understands who her audience is and gives ‘’Barbara’ as she so aptly likes to call her, what she wants. Her ability to adapt her tone, clearly honed by years of writing across different publications, gives the book a voice that is approachable yet intelligent, combining factual depth with imaginative storytelling.
Underlying this approach is her belief that “you shouldn’t surrender a subject just to a specialist.” Colour, like so many aspects of daily life, belongs to everyone. It permeates our environments, shapes our memories, and influences our moods.
As the conversation and Tanti’s painting progressed, Caruana and St Clair also invited us to think about authenticity in writing. When asked about the growing influence of AI, she expressed concern not that machines would eventually replace writers, because she’s confident they never would be but that if the industry insists on valuing efficiency over depth and authenticity it may lead itself down a rabbithole of inferiority that in truth can never really rival the capability of a human author and everything that comes with it: a unique voice, human experience and the ability to research outside of the confines of the internet. All of her books embody this ethos.
Perhaps most striking is how colour serves as a bridge between place and identity. When interestingly asked by an audience member what colour she associates with Malta for example, the author recalls sandstone beige façades and turquoise shutters, shades that evoke the island’s essence without a single explanatory word. These personal associations remind us that colour is as much about memory as it is about perception. Maltese artist Tanti responds to this in his own way, closing off the night with a painting that anthropomorphises colour, his own representation of “Dawn” through the very shades referenced in St Clair’s book which Tanti and Inizjamed graciously agreed to gift the author at the end of the night.
In the end, the event succeeded because it was far more than just another talk between two intellectuals, it was an evening brimming with colour, talent, artistry and storytelling encouraging us to look again and again at what we might otherwise overlook. Hats off to all involved.
The Secret Lives of Colour’, was a Sunday Times top-ten bestseller and has been translated into over 20 languages. Other books by Kassia St Clare include ‘The Golden Thread’, which was a Sunday Times Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Somerset Maugham Award and ‘The Race to the Future: The Adventure that Accelerated the 20th Century’.
