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 line opens Spaciada sa Bregungia. It is in Sardinian, or rather, in the Sardinian I have. Which is not the same thing.
Spaciada sa Bregungia opens with sheep bells, that particular, unhurried sound that in Sardinia means you are exactly where you should be. Against that texture, my voice arrives, in a language I should have grown up speaking. I didn't.
I didn't grow up speaking Sardinian. My parents made a choice, a rational one, from where they stood. They believed that Italian was the language of the future, of education, of opportunity. That raising their children in Sardinian would mark us as peasants, hold us back, make us targets. They were trying to give us a better life. They were themselves products of a system that had taught them, convincingly, that their own language was an obstacle.
Nobody taught me the language of my home. The one my illiterate grandmother spoke. The one I couldn't use to talk to her because I didn't understand it. My parents thought they were protecting me. They were also, without knowing it, cutting me off from my own people. That loss doesn't go away.
Spaciada sa Bregungia moves from that personal wound outward, through history, through politics, through the specific and ongoing ways a land and its people get diminished. It is not a gentle piece.
On the language, and the criticism.
Before I released this piece, I nearly didn't.
Fluent Sardinian speakers told me that releasing a piece with imperfect grammar would damage the language. That it would reflect badly. That I should perhaps not do it at all. I was stopped cold. Angry. Sad. Confused.
Because the reason my Sardinian isn't perfect is exactly what the piece is about. My mother didn't teach me because she herself was a victim of the same colonial system I was speaking against. And now the gatekeepers, the vigilantes who chastise those who don't have a perfect knowledge of the language they were never taught, were telling me that the imperfection caused by that very erasure was reason enough to stay silent.
That is the trap. That is how the damage perpetuates itself.
I had even thought about asking a friend to correct my Sardinian so it would all be grammatically sound. But then it would have been written correctly, and it would not have been me.
Two good friends talked me back. I went ahead. Imperfect. Mine.
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. No idea about the history, the colonial relationship, the language suppression, the ongoing erasure. How Sardinian history, culture and language are still not on the school curriculum. How this is still happening now.
This is also a call to action, for every Sardinian ostracised twice over: first by the erasure of their mother tongue, then by the gatekeepers of a language they were never taught.
To the occupying power that still doesn't recognise our millennial past: you know what you can do with that.
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.