Maltese author James Vella-Bardon to feature at Manly Writers Festival

Maltese author James Vella-Bardon will officially launch the fifth and final novel in his The Sassana Stone Pentalogy in his adopted homeland Australia at the 2025 Manly Writers Festival this weekend.

The Ring of Ruse describes the last struggle by 16th-century Irish rebels in Connacht against the largest English force to be ever assembled on foreign soil and serves as the culmination of Vella-Bardon’s epic fictional series.

The novel also further develops the fate of its protagonist’s secret prize as well as his tortured and strained romantic relationship with the Irish poet-bard, Muireann Mac An Bhaird.

Vella-Bardon will feature at the 2025 Manly Writers Festival as a guest alongside acclaimed Australian novelist Emily Maguire, during a talk hosted by Professor Victoria Haskins of the University of Newcastle, New South Wales.

The title of the talk - “Historical Fiction Beyond the Border” – is a nod to fiction that breaks away from Anglo-centric historical narratives.

Vella-Bardon graduated in law and practiced as a lawyer in Malta and then Sydney until he refocused his career on his great passion – writing. His debut ‘The Sheriff’s Catch’ was published in the UK by crowdfunding publisher Unbound in 2018. The novel was named ‘book of the month’ by the University of Malta library in 2018. It was also named a finalist at various, reputable literary awards, even winning ‘best novel’ and ‘best historical fiction’ at the Royal Dragonfly Awards’ in the US.

He has since published four other books in the series, as well as a novella and short story on Robert the Bruce. The London Economic has praised Vella-Bardon for the “sheer quality, integrity and emotional resonance” of his writing.

The Sassana Stone series revisits a historic era through the eyes of a fictional protagonist, the Maltese-born marksman in the Spanish Army of Flanders, Abel de Santiago.

‘Santi’, as he is nicknamed, turns avenger after suffering an appalling personal outrage at the hands of his flown comrades. After tracking them down to Seville, his hopes of revenge are foiled when he is press-ganged into serving as an enslaved rower on a Spanish Armada galley. Following the Armada’s subsequent sound defeat to the English fleet and its unnatural storms, ‘Santi’ finds himself shipwrecked in western Ireland - specifically the region of Connacht – which is brutally suppressed by English colonists.

After finding himself a castaway on an Irish beach, Santi is captured and sentenced to torture and death, by a brutal English sheriff. He flees his captors through a quirk of fate, taking with him a trinket that, unknown to Santi and his Irish allies, is of immense value and which the Sassanas will stop at nothing to get back.

The Armada shipwrecks also spark off a sequence of dramatic events that culminate in a great uprising in Connacht against its English oppressors – one led by the mythical rebel leader, Brian O’Rourke.

James Vella-Bardon's novels are available for sale at all your favourite local or online book stores.