Mario Azzopardi, poet and theatre director, has died, aged 77.

Azzopardi, a teacher by profession, is one of Malta’s leading poets, a theatre director and cultural journalist. For many years he taught at the Sixth Form in Msida.

He also wrote short stories for young adults.

Azzopardi was born in Ħamrun, studied at the University of Malta and attended the Teachers’ College. He graduated with an M.Phil in Theatre Studies with a thesis on the concept of the communal theatre.

He is a co-founder of the counter-cultural Moviment Qawmien Letterarju and a co-founder of the children’s educational magazine Sagħtar.

Azzopardi headed the Malta Drama Centre until 2014.

He served as one of the first resident tutors of the Maltese Academy of Dramatic Art from 1977 to 1981, and the drama unit. He set up the Lyceum Youth Theatre in 1979, and conducted theatre in education projects in London, Paris, Sonnenberg, Trento, Bolzano throughout the 1980s, and with Jane Maud of the Young Vic Company in London.

In 1987, he founded Politeatru, a drama forum to cater “for the culturally deprived masses”.

In reviewing his last book, Epistoli mid-Desert, Patricia Gatt had described Azzopardi as an "iconoclast who opposes institutional rigidity and group-think, (and who) perseveres in projecting a poetic voice that is highly distinctive within local literary production. It's a voice that persists in finding ways to articulate the grand themes of human existence, doggedly refusing to regard poetry simply as entertainment or therapy in its insistence that readers' step out of their comfort zone of passive indifference that feeds into an attitude of helpless resignation."

Among those who paid tribute to Azzopardi was Alfred Sant, politician and writer, who said that Azzopardi's writings will never die.