Alessio Emmanuel "Alex" Vella (born 1954), or The Maltese Falcon, is a Maltese-Australian businessman, former boxer and National President of the Rebels Motorcycle Club. Despite having lived in Australia since the 1960s, he is not a citizen of the country. This caused visa problems when he was in Tokyo, Japan with his son Adam (also a boxer) for a boxing match.

Vella was born into a strict Catholic family in Malta and was one of eleven children. His parents lived in a cave with no electricity and a well for water. He began work at the age of eight, carrying buckets of water on a building site for 30 cents a day, and is functionally illiterate. He and his family then moved to Australia in the 1960s and established a strawberry farm near Horsley Park, New South Wales. In his 20s, he sometimes worked two or three jobs at a time; as a bouncer, labourer and bricklayer. He also joined the Rebels Motorcycle Club while pursuing a promising career as a boxer; he eventually became the Maltese light-heavyweight champion. After a serious road accident, he received $225,000 in compensation and used this money to set up a business importing and selling motorcycles. In 1990, police found a $15,000 stash of marijuana while searching his home, which they believed to be a methamphetamine factory. He received a fairly light sentence, however; 18-months of two-nights-a-week prison, and two-days-a-week community service. He has also been arrested, but not convicted, of a number of other crimes including stabbing two men and assaulting a woman. He was freed on appeal after being given six months' jail for the latter.

Antoine Cassar (1978) is a Maltese poet and translator. In September 2009, his multilingual poem Merħba was the Grand Prize winner of the United Planet Writing Contest.

Cassar's mużajki or mosaics poems combine a minimum of five languages, mainly English, French, Italian, Maltese and Spanish, often in the form of a Petrarchan sonnet. These poems, the first series of which was published in July 2007 in the anthology Ħbula Stirati (Tightropes), engage in the braiding of words and sounds in the different languages used whilst maintaining a coherent rhythm and logical poetic sequence. Among the main themes explored by the mosaics are the vanity and futility of life, love unrequited or fulfilled, the absurdity of colonialism and its after-effects, and the at once exhilarating and disorienting feeling of variety itself. The following is a stanza from his sonnet C'est la vie

As Marija Grech explains, "...the deeper significance of these poems may be said to lie not simply in the more traditional meaning of the individual words or verses, but more specifically in the play with sound that the movement from one language to another generates and exploits. As the poet explains, 'the mosaics are designed not so much to be read but to be heard'." Cassar, on an interview, describes the meaning of the "multiple levels" on his poetry: "How often does one read or listen to a poem and understand it completely? In my reading experience, I find that if a poem offers all its connotation, undertones and beauty at one go, its taste will soon be forgotten... The multiple levels of a poem should pique and stir the readers' curiosity, slowly but surely bringing them deeper into the text."