Praspar Press

03/12/2025

Before the Rocket is a Book of the Month at Voce Books 💛

🗣️ VOCE BOOKS OF THE MONTH, NOVEMBER 2025

📚 BAD LANGUAGE, by So Mayer for

📚 AFTERNOON DRINKING by for

📚 THE WAITER by .tan for

📚 THE FEMINIST ART OF WALKING by for

📚 WORDS ARE MY MATTER by Ursula K. Le Guin for

📚 BEFORE THE ROCKET by trans. from Maltese by for

📚 ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME I, II by Solve B***e trans. from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland for

📚 ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME III, by Solve B***e trans. from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell for

📚 THE BENEFACTORS by for

02/12/2025

Incredible to see Clare Azzopardi’s The Lives and Deaths of K. Penza, translated by Albert Gatt, in the Staff Recommendations at Brick Lane Bookshop ! Clare Azzopardi Brick Lane Bookshop

28/11/2025

Imagine our surprise when we visited the London Review Bookshop yesterday to find Before the Rocket pride of place both inside and in the window ! We are so grateful for the support from all our indie bookshop stockists!

Loranne Vella

27/11/2025

We’re so happy that wonderful indie bookshop Voce Books has chosen Before the Rocket by Loranne Vella and translated by Kat Storace as their Book of the Week!

🗣 VOCE BOOK OF THE WEEK

📚 BEFORE THE ROCKET, by LORANNE VELLA, trans. from Maltese 🇲🇹 by KAT STORACE published by PRASPAR PRESS

✒️ ‘…Malta, 2064.
The island is being battered by rising waves and scorching heat. The Italian regime has colonised Malta and is using it as a base for their space exploration programme. Following the tragic death of his grandmother and mentor, the famous photographer Rika Dimech, Petrel sets off in search of her roots, initially only planning to spend a couple of weeks on the occupied island. He soon finds himself entwined in its past, present and future, always gravitating towards the same house in the village of Ħaż-Żebbuġ…

‘Before the Rocket’ is a masterful work of speculative fiction that launches readers on a gripping journey through time in pursuit of freedom....’

📚 BEFORE THE ROCKET is now in stock at Voce Books, priced £12.

18/07/2025

🚀 Cover reveal / pre-order link open!

You can now pre-order BEFORE THE ROCKET, the English translation by Kat Storace of Loranne Vella’s National Book Prize-winning novel ROKIT.

Pre-order online with FREE SHIPPING. We currently ship within the UK only: https://www.praspar.com/product/before-the-rocket

Malta, 2064. The island is being battered by rising waves and scorching heat. The Italian regime has colonised Malta and is using it as a base for their space exploration programme. Following the tragic death of his grandmother and mentor, the famous photographer Rika Dimech, Petrel sets off in search of her roots, initially only planning to spend a couple of weeks on the occupied island. He soon finds himself entwined in its past, present and future, always gravitating towards the same house in the village of Ħaż-Żebbuġ... Before the Rocket is a masterful work of speculative fiction that launches readers on a gripping journey through time in pursuit of freedom.

06/03/2024

We’re delighted to announce that Kat Storace’s translation of a long excerpt from Loranne Vella’s novel Marta Marta has been selected for publication in The White Review’s Writing in Translation anthology! The anthology is described as housing “some of the most innovative and exciting writers working today.”

There will be a launch event in April at TANK in London. Visit The White Review’s page for further info.

Loranne Vella was awarded the National Book Prize of Malta for her novels Marta Marta and Rokit, and was shortlisted for her short story collection ‘Mill-bieb ‘il ġewwa.’

Kat Storace was just awarded a PEN Translates Award in support of her translation of Rokit, which we’ll be publishing next year. Storace was also shortlisted for the Society of Authors TA First Translation Prize for her translation of Vella’s short story collection, published by us as ‘what will it take for me to leave’ in 2021. Storace is co-publisher at Praspar Press.

02/02/2024

📣BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT📣 We’re thrilled to announce that we’ll be publishing Daniel Vella’s debut novel in spring 2025.

We started our anthology series Scintillas partly in the hope that we would discover a writer who we could work with for their first book. After publishing Daniel’s work in our first two anthologies, we were very keen to work with him on a larger project, and we’re so pleased that Daniel has produced a mesmerising, genre-bending work that blends fiction, psycho-geography, cultural memory and post-colonial history through the site and orbit of a fictional Maltese village. The novel (title TBA) will be our first work originally written in English.
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In a series of interconnected stories and essayistic interludes that intertwine, spin off in unexpected directions and meet again to echo, reflect and comment upon each other, a fictional Maltese village emerges: Ħal Minsi, a place lost and found, a half-remembered memory, an ephemeral presence vanishing and re-appearing in the folds of the country as it changes beyond recognition over the course of the last hundred years. A broad cast of characters move through and between these stories: housewives, artists, migrants, returned expats, petty criminals, daydreaming schoolchildren, lost teenagers, priests, politicians and real estate magnates, those who are drawn to Ħal Minsi, those who find there an answer to a question they never knew they carried within themselves, those who long to return but cannot, and those who do the unthinkable out of their desperation to leave for good.

Daniel Vella is a writer and academic at the Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta. He has previously worked as a freelance cultural journalist with the Times of Malta and as a scriptwriter for daily children’s show Iż-Żona. He is a narrative designer for board games with Mighty Boards, and his narrative design work for board games includes Posthuman Saga (2019) and the upcoming Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan (2024), which is being translated into six languages. He is the co-author of Virtual Existentialism: Meaning and Subjectivity in Virtual Worlds (Palgrave, 2020). This is his first novel.

29/01/2024

We love Scintillas: New Maltese Writing so much - it’s brought writers and translators to new readers and us a lot of joy. We’re incredibly proud of Scintillas 1, 2 and 3 in equal measure. As for the next edition of Scintillas, we have decided to not produce an anthology this year. Though the anthology series has been wildly successful, it’s a lot of work and as we have TWO fantastic (and big!) books coming out next year we’ve decided to pause the anthology to focus on these titles (one of which Kat is also translating!). We hope to bring Scintillas back next year. In the meantime, do continue picking up Scintillas 2 and the newest in the series, Scintillas 3 from us and our stockists - and writing, of course. More info on our forthcoming books coming soon! 💛🩷 https://www.praspar.com/products

04/12/2023

The Scintillas Corner by the till at the London Review Bookshop is going strong for a third year! 💚