Winner, HearSay International Audio Festival 2026
"Every time I'm in the car and a flock of sheep passes in front of me, it almost feels like this is my home."
That's my voice in Spaciada sa Bregungia. It is in Sardinian, or rather, in the Sardinian I have. Which is not the same thing.
With English subtitles [Italian subtitles below]
Spaciada sa Bregungia is an act of courage. For me, a professional translator who writes, creates and wins awards in two other languages acquired as an adult, going public with a work in a language that I know to be ungrammatical and imperfect was an incredible effort, and right up to the last moment it was on the verge of not happening.
I was born in Sardinia, a land with a language and a tradition thousands of years old, a land where everyone spoke Sardinian. Or at least that was so until the rupture that began with my generation, because even though the authorities had decided that in Sardinia, at school and in institutions, only Italian was to be spoken, inside families and outside institutions people kept speaking Sardinian, in spite of the government during the years of the fascism, which was particularly hostile to the use of any element that recognised Sardinia as having an identity of its own.
With my generation things began to change forever.
As a child my parents spoke to each other in Sardinian, while with me they spoke Italian, acquired to function in public life. Because my parents, like the vast majority of their generation, were convinced that the way to guarantee their children the best future was to raise them in the language of the nation that used Sardinia to exploit its resources, that used it as a place to send civil servants as a punishment. So I grew up speaking only Italian, and in Sardinian I learned only a few words and the swear words that come out of me spontaneously in Sardinian when I curse on impulse.
Not speaking Sardinian prevented me from communicating with my grandmother, who lived in a little mountain village of a few hundred souls, my grandmother, who had never been to school, had had 11 children, was illiterate and spoke only Sardinian.
For many years I couldn’t forgive my mother for not teaching me her language and for cutting me off from my history. Only later did I understand that my parents (both of them, not just my mother, because it is always too easy to lay the blame only on mothers) were themselves victims of the colonial culture that has always exercised its power through cultural hegemony.
Spaciada sa Bregungia exploded inside me.
For a long time I had been trying to recover my language, forcing myself to speak it and feeling deeply ashamed of it, the same shame that led my parents’ generation to speak Italian with us, and one night I woke up at two in the morning with these sentences exploding in my head, and I started writing them down without knowing how, pronouncing them out loud and trying to transcribe them the way you do with the sounds of a language you don’t know, but the more the words came to my mind, the more I felt their strength, and the anger turned into defiance. That is how Spaciada sa Bregungia came out, all in one go, suddenly, in a single night.
And it is a work that was about to go unpublished. Because the next morning I reread the sentences and the damned shame came back, because how could I, a linguist and translator, a devotee and scholar of the language, publish something that I know to be full of mistakes and distortions? Driven by the same shame I thought of having my Sardinian corrected by someone who studies it and speaks it correctly, but instead of encouragement for my decision, I was told that it was impossible to correct, and that if I published something written so badly I would be doing a great disservice to the ongoing effort to recover and value the Sardinian language.
I almost gave up on everything. If it weren’t for the fact that my not knowing how to speak the language is the result of centuries of colonialism and of cultural and military occupations that still exist today in Sardinia, an island with 2% of the Italian population and more than 60% of the national military servitudes. The shame I carry inside is still there, but now I shout it at those who want to keep my land on its knees, I shout it in the face of colonialists and colonialism, of extractivism and of the poverty of my people. Now they are the ones who should be ashamed.
What happened at HearSay.
Spaciada sa Bregungia won the Golden Prize at HearSay International Audio Festival 2026. Being part of that community is a joy. But seeing this piece celebrated on an international stage is something else, it is a personal vindication. A scream of rage.
Dozens of people approached me at the festival, from Ireland, from across Europe, from places that had no reason to know anything about Sardinia. They told me they had no idea about the history, the colonial relationship, the language suppression.
My Sardinian grammar may not be perfect. But in my heart I know that I made the case. I brought Sardinia onto an international stage and people heard it.
Spaciada sa Bregungia. No more shame.
Credits
Created, spoken, produced, edited and mixed by M. Cristina Marras.
Voices: Shepherd — Gianfranco Bitti; D.H. Lawrence — Romeo M. Minutolo.
Murra players recorded live at the Sardinian Murra Championship, Urzulei, Sardinia.
Music: Art of a Dead Man by Shadows; Under the Skin by Semo; The Fall (instrumental) by Or Chausha. All music licensed via Artlist.