James Vella-Bardon

James Vella-Bardon was born and raised in Malta, an island nation influenced by thousands of years of imperial history, from the Romans to the British where his passion for exciting and dramatic historical events was formed. After reading law and history at the Universities of both Malta and Sydney, James qualified as a lawyer and completed a PhD on the rights and freedoms of peoples at international law. He emigrated to Sydney in 2007 and turned his hand to novel writing. His debut novel The Sheriff’s Catch (2018), which recounts the adventures of a Spanish Armada castaway in Tudor Ireland, made bestseller lists in Europe and was also named an ‘Outstanding Historical’ by the IAN Book Awards in 2019, while receiving various other international awards and nominations. James was heralded as ‘the new king of historical fiction’ by British newspaper The Scotsman, in their review of his novella Mad King Robin, about Robert the Bruce.

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