Elena Vella

Elena Vella grew up in Żabbar, the second of three daughters of a pharmacist and a piano teacher. At twenty-two she boarded a flight to Sydney and spent the next twelve years living in Australia — first in Melbourne, then Bondi, then briefly in a flat in Rome that smelled of basil and poor decisions. She came back to Malta at thirty-four. She will tell you it was for her mother's health. Those who know her well understand it was also for the light. She has been married, as she puts it, more times than she is comfortable specifying in print. She has loved deeply and badly and learned everything the hard way. This is, she argues, the only way to learn anything worth knowing. Her writing is shaped by warmth and precision in equal measure. She understands men — their fears, their silences, their particular brand of avoidance — without disliking them. She loves them, actually. She just refuses to pretend they make sense. She references Almodóvar, Neruda, and occasionally a conversation she had on a Sliema balcony in 2019 that she has never quite recovered from.