Foundry Editions was founded in 2023 out of a love of three things - a love for discovering and sharing new voices, a love for the Mediterranean and the people and lands that surround it, and a love of internationalism and reading across borders.
We are on a mission to uncover authors who are new to English, and to share the joy of reading their stories, which come from a part of the world that has always been a source of cultural and emotional inspiration for English language readers.
If you are looking for enriching story-telling and intelligent, thought-provoking, beautiful writing, that captures something of the lives, imaginations, beliefs and preoccupations of people who live around the middle sea, then you will find something to love in the books we publish.
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HIGHLIGHTS FOR THE AUTUMN
COMING NOVEMBER
Winner of the Premio Campiello Opera Prima 2025.
Political satire and choral novel meet in a merciless exposé of our broken power systems in a biting portrait of provincial political life
It's election time again in our small town that could be anywhere but is in fact among the dying olive groves of Puglia. Everything is about to kick off. Lines are being drawn, ‘us’ and ‘them’ are taking their positions, and alliances are being made in the shake of a hand, the wink of an eye or over the chink of an espresso cup in the bar on the piazza. The ‘hopliticians’ are massing in their phalanxes once again.
This scorching political satire by one of Italy’s most thrilling new writers is a choral novel that follows the personal and public vicissitudes of a cast of wannabe politicos and absurd party factions, as they scrabble for power with the lesson of that great Italian masterpiece The Leopard apparently foremost in their minds: for things to remain the same – for power to stay in place – everything must change. The book was a finalist for the Premio Italo Calvino 2023 and winner of the Premio Campiello Opera Prima 2025.
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“Antonio Galetta’s debut impresses for the quality of its writing and the originality of its construction. The structure – non-linear yet tightly cohesive – and the language, characterised by lexical inventiveness and code-switching between the comic and the bureaucratic, the grotesque and the lyrical, are both proof of the writer’s remarkable stylistic ambition.” JURY, PREMIO CAMPIELLO 2025
“An exuberant political allegory about the quiet violence of everyday power.” IL FOGLIO
“The novel prises open the hidden mechanisms of power and lays us bare in the process. Mercilessly.” NEW ITALIAN BOOKS
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AUTHOR
ANTONIO GALETTA was born in Ceglie Messapica, Puglia in 1998. He studied Italian literature and is currently undertaking doctoral research on the contemporary novel between the Univeristy of Pisa and the Sorbonne. His work explores power, politics and collective behaviour, through formally innovative narrative voices rooted in southern Italian settings.
TRANSLATOR
ANTONELLA LETTIERI is a translator working between English and Italian. Her translations include Maria Grazia Calandrone’s Your Little Matter (Foundry Editions, 2024), Roberta Recchia’s All That Is Left of Life (Dialogue Books, 2025), and Matteo Melchiorre’s The Duke (Foundry Editions, 2025), which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. She won the John Dryden Translation Competition in 2023 and her translation of Maria Grazia Calandrone’s Your Little Matter won the 2025 TA First Translation Prize.
£13.99
304 pages
Political satire and choral novel meet in a merciless exposé of our broken power systems in a biting portrait of provincial political life
NEW RELEASE
Longlisted for the 2026 National Book Award for Translated Fiction (USA)
Two young Palestinian men find love in a mythical Jerusalem, oppressed by occupation and a biblical sandstorm
As a sandstorm of biblical proportions covers the land, two men cross paths in the labyrinthine old city of Jerusalem, where for centuries lovers have seduced each other by night with tales of jinns, warriors and wild beasts. Gabriel and Isaac fall in love, lose each other and find each other again. Then, despite the sand-filled wind and the yoke of occupation, they decide to go on holiday, on a road trip through the West Bank, a dangerous act of daring in a divided land.
After THE PALACE ON THE HIGHER HILL, Karim Kattan returns to the Palestine of his imagination, mixing orality with classical culture, the marvellous with the tragically real. Lyrical, languorous and shattering Eden at Dawn is a cry for love in the midst of war that confirms the strength of the author’s literary universe.
Widely acclaimed in France, Eden at Dawn has won several literary awards and was shortlisted for the Prix Renaudot in 2024. This translation has also been longlisted for the US National Book Award for Translated Literature 2026.
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“Karim Kattan’s book is an unforgettable queer love story, sensuous and otherworldly. Politically astute and mythical in scope, Kattan’s language transforms the language of desire into something luminous and enduring.” SALEEM HADDAD, author of Floodlines and Guapa
“A rare gem of a story – bittersweet, luminous, and intimate enough to feel like someone is whispering secrets in your ear.” ANGELO TIJSSENS, author of The Edges
“Karim Kattan is carving out a distinct path in the literary world with novels whose magnetic style carries the reader far away into a universe that is sensual, political and of breathtaking beauty.” LIBÉRATION
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AUTHOR
KARIM KATTAN is a Palestinian writer and poet. He was born in 1989 in Jerusalem and holds a doctorate in comparative literature. His 2017 shortstory collection, Préliminaires pour un verger futur, was a finalist for the Prix Boccace. The Palace on the Higher Hill, his first novel, won the 2021 Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie, and was published by Foundry Editions in 2025.
TRANSLATOR
JEFFREY ZUCKERMAN is a translator of French literature. His work centers on contemporary fiction from mainland France and Mauritius—including Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Carl de Souza—as well as texts of the queer canon, including Jean Genet and Hervé GuibertIn addition to the many awards and honours he has received for his work, he was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government
£13.99
330 pages
Two young Palestinian men find love in a mythical Jerusalem, oppressed by occupation and a biblical sandstorm
OUT NOW
Love, lust, adulthood and an ancient Fiat in one long hot Maltese summer
School’s out for summer, and for our unnamed narrator, that means three months away from his physics high school students to tinker with his ancient Fiat 131 and fret about his all-consuming obsession: Sarah, a tempestuous artist he met online. They sleep together, they text obsessively, but as July’s barbecues and boat trips segue into August’s festi, their intimate moments always reset into platonic disappointment, and she increasingly ghosts him in favour of an ever-changing group of new besties.
A sensation on its home island, this book gives poignant voice to a regular guy in his early thirties, trying to get a grip on love, life and growing up, and it paints a high-octane portrait of what it means to live in the hedonistic, overcrowded, workaholic, claustrophobic, contradictory mind-blast that is Malta.
You Know The Sun Bothers Me was shortlisted for the 2023 National Book Prize and the author won Malta’s National Book Prize for Best emerging Author in 2024. It is the winner of a PEN Translates award.
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“A powerfully idiomatic, warts-and-all vision of contemporary Malta, especially that which millennials experience.” ALEX VELLA GERA, THE MALTESE READER
“The only novel an author has to writ before they can retire for the rest of their lives. It captures the spirit of the times.” MARK VELLA
“Falzon’s novel captures the millennial and Gen Z experience against the backdrop of a scorching Maltese summer. Vintage cars, excessive drinking and moral ambiguity frame the story.” THE TIMES OF MALTA
“From the very first page, it puts you in the passenger seat and drives you at breakneck speed through every street, bypass and flyover on the island as it is today.” LORANNE VELLA
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AUTHOR
RYAN FALZON was born in Malta in 1988. He is an artist, author and art educator. His work is often abrasive and playful and he is known for constructing narratives by arranging texts and images in a collage-like fashion. Since 2011, Falzon has published several short pieces and his novel, Sajf (You Know The Sun Bothers Me) has been described as the voice of the Maltese millennial generation.
TRANSLATOR
JOE GATT is a writer, translator and editor. After stints in London and Berlin, he now lives in Brussels. In London he was the editor of GSpot magazine and did editorial work for Vogue and The Modern Review. His writing has appeared in Scintillas: New Maltese Writing 1 (Praspar Press), The London Magazine and Antoloġija 1 (Aphroconfuso) as well as publications including The Face, Dazed & Confused and The Guardian. He is co-editor of the Maltese literary journal Aphroconfuso.
£13.99
314 pages
Love, lust, adulthood and an ancient Fiat in one long hot Maltese summer
OUT NOW
Longlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize
In the tradition of a 19th-century epic — in a compelling twenty-first-century light
Outside Vallorgana, a tiny, isolated village high in the foothills of the Dolomites, the ‘Duke’ lives in the villa of his aristocratic ancestors. The last in the centuries’ old line of the Cimamontes, he spends his days on his land and absorbed in the family archive, tolerated, if gently ridiculed by the villagers who are his neighbours. When he finds out that the village big man is taking timber from his land, he has a decision to make. Will he stay in his glorious, cerebral isolation, or will he honour his ancestral blood and take action against this affront?
Matteo Melchiorre’s portrait of the idiosyncratic character of the Duke and the world of Valorgana is a sweeping feat of literary imagination. With the pace, panorama and plot twists of a great nineteenth-century classic, the breathless story of the Duke’s ensuing feud unfolds, asking some big twenty-first century questions about our relationships with privilege, the past, the natural world and each other.
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“The Duke is the story of a feud between two men set in an Italian village in the Dolomites. The build-up of tension as the quarrel gradually escalates is electric, as each move they make turns the heat up one more notch. Anyone who’s been in a dispute will recognise the reluctance to step away from the fight. The characters that the author paints are wonderfully evocative, including many of the minor figures who form part of the village. The village itself is one of the strongest ‘characters’ and we loved the feeling of claustrophobia of the place as the narrative unfolds. Packed full of plot twists, this is storytelling at its best.” INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE JUDGES
“This strange language takes hold of you - like a forest growing around you - and you don’t even notice.” PAOLO COGNETTI
“It’s a story set in the present, yes—but a present heavy with the weight of centuries. It has been a long time since I’ve read such a powerful novel, a novel that seeks to re-enchant the world.” TIZIANO SCARPA
“With The Duke, Matteo Melchiorre has crafted a taut, epic tale about the madness of power, the laws of nature and individual freedom.” IL LIBRAIO
“This remarkable book makes us believe that some of the reasons why we still plough our way through novels might still be alive: the thirst for adventure, the chill of the mountains, a sense of greatness slightly beyond our reach.” La Lettura, CORRIERE DELLA SERA
AUTHOR
MATTEO MELCHIORRE was born in 1981, Matteo Melchiorre began his professional career in academia as a researcher at the University of Udine and then the University Ca' Foscari, and the Iuav of Venice. He has been the director of the Museum Library and the Historical Archive of Castelfranco Veneto since 2018. He specializes in the economic and social history of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, as well as the history of mountains and forests. His first novel, Il Duca was published by Eianudi in 2022.
TRANSLATOR
ANTONELLA LETTIERI is London-based translator working into English and Italian and collaborates regularly with Foundry Editions. She was the 2023 National Centre for Writing Emerging Translator Mentee for Italian and worked with Howard Curtis. She translated Maria Grazia Calandrone’s Your Little Matter, her translations have appeared in Asymptote and she was awarded the first prize in the 2023 John Dryden Translation Competition.
£14.99
468 pages
“Packed full of plot twists, this is storytelling at its best.“ INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE JUDGES
In the tradition of a 19th-century epic — in a compelling twenty-first-century light
RECENT RELEASES
A powerful examination of grief, family lies and the postcolonial condition in one woman’s attempt to repatriate her father’s body to France.
Annabella Morelli is twenty-three years old, dreams of becoming a poet and lives in Lyon, far from Congo-Brazzaville where she was born. The daughter of a Franco-Italian worker, and a Congolese girl who became a mother too young, Annabella remembers a happy childhood until one Christmas, at the age of seven, her father's anger exploded, and her mother left the family home.
When she learns of his death in Cameroon, her world collapses for the second time and in her desperate attempt to repatriate her father’s body to France, Annabella is forced to confront the family secrets, lies and deep trauma at the heart of her existence. This stunning debut explores grief, family relationships, personal truths and the post-colonial condition with beautiful, urgent writing. It was the winner of the 2024 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman and the 2024 Prix Transfuge du Meilleur Premier Roman.
£13.99
199 pages
A powerful examination of grief, family lies and the postcolonial condition in one woman’s attempt to repatriate her father’s body to France.
One night in Madrid , two hapless chancers, and a greyhound called Cromwell.
One night in Madrid. The one the tourists, and plenty of Madrileños never see. The Madrid of poker games, scams and dodgy deals. Of flyovers, bus stations and industrial estates. Of gamblers, gangsters, and the odd saint, who might just perform a miracle. The Madrid of Sánchez and Nikki.
In her latest book, Esther García Llovet follows this not quite Bonnie & Clyde pair of chancers on the brink as they desperately hunt down a greyhound called Cromwell, who might just be the answer to all their problems. With her razor-sharp language, her inimitable eye for the absurd, and her surreal style, that feels like David Lynch after too much vermut, García Llovet reveals herself as a cinematic storyteller par excellence and an unrivalled, passionate portraitist of the Spanish capital and the characters who live in its shadows.
£12.99
123 pages
One night in Madrid , two hapless chancers, and a greyhound called Cromwell.
In tired, hot Paris at the end of August, a group of friends, who’d rather still be at the sea, meet for a dinner in one couple’s apartment.
Taking us behind the shutters of the Sixth Arrondissement, with a cast of characters that both delight and repel, fractured relationships, manipulation, bad behaviour and desperation are all laid bare in this very contemporary take on a Parisian huis clos story.
What starts as just a little dinner ends up having monumental consequences for everyone.
£12.99
155 pages
Parisians behaving badly: one night in the Sixth gets the Elizabeth Day treatment
On the hottest day of one of the hottest summers anyone can remember, journalist Federico Desideri is sent on an assignment: to interview Italy’s latest Oscar-winning film director. But in Rome. A world away from the reassuring familiarity of his native Milan.
When the director turns out to be elusive, and the Romans as rough as their reputation, Federico falls in with Barry Volpicelli, a seductive, fast-talking, America-obsessed rogue and supposed inspiration for the winning movie’s lead character. Instead of nailing the interview, he finds himself in Paradiso— a crumbling seaside estate with an eccentric cast of inhabitants who seem frozen in time.
Combining the style and charm of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty with the wit of Alan Bennett, this social comedy for the social media generation is a blisteringly funny exploration of reality, illusion and the enduring myth of the Eternal City.
“The book everyone is talking about. By our sharpest writer, who is as cynical as he is tender” LUCA GUADAGNINO, Director of CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
“No Italian writer for a couple of generations has found such a pitch-perfect balance between cattiness and literary elegance and depth.” VINCENZO LATRONICO, Author of PERFECTION
“A darkly comic journey through the Roman night, among eccentric characters and disenchanted glamour” CORRIERE DELLA SERA
£13.99
249 pages
Fellini film colliding with The White Lotus, or Paolo Sorrentino colliding with Alan Bennett. A darkly comic satire on power, cultural currency and the enduring legacy of The Eternal City.
Featured Titles:
Faysal receives a mysterious letter about the death of aunt he can’t remember. Leaving his lover and his life in Europe behind, he returns to the village of his birth in Palestine and to his family’s extraordinary, deserted house, the palace on the higher hill. With a backdrop of violence and the permanent threat from settlers, Faysal wanders the once-lavish rooms as characters from the past return to shed light on his family story and on the story of his people.
In beautiful, angry prose, Karim Kattan introduces us to an intimate Palestine of the imagination where dreams and nightmares are in constant conflict. With hints of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Brideshead Revisited, he gives a nuanced deeply moving vision of the tragedy of war and a picture of his homeland that feels entirely new to English-speaking readers.
The book won the 2021 Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie.
“Absolument merveilleux” JMG LeClezio, winner Nobel Prize for Literature, Prix Renaudot
“Nobody is ever going to forget his intimate vision of Palestine, seen through unbridled, brand new eyes.” L’HUMANITÉ
“Every word is brilliant and alive.” RADIO FRANCE INTERNATIONAL
A crooked cop on a punk, picaresque chase through Benidorm's underbelly on the trail of Reggie Kray's cigarette lighter.
Meet Michela - English gangster father, flamenco dancer mother - a hard, uncompromising police officer, operating on the shadier side of the law. In the company of this unorthodox, magnetically compelling character, cult writer Esther García Llovet takes us on a breath-taking, high-speed, anarchic romp through the underbelly of the pearl of the Costa Brava, Benidorm, on the hunt for Reggie Kray’s stolen cigarette lighter.
Beyond the sunburn and all-day fry-ups, in casinos, bars that are fronts for money laundering and flashy high society parties, we meet an unforgettable cast of characters: English gangsters, Russian mafiosi, chancers, no-hopers, and low-life of all complexions in this unconventional yet literary thriller. With a turn of phrase that always astonishes, an eye for detail that is as forensic as it is cinematic, a sense of humour as dry as a glass of fino, and a wilful desire to break conventional genres, Llovet’s book feels like the best of Almodóvar in surreal, novel form.
“Washed-up Brits, local lowlifes and a Kray twin’s lighter: noir novel Spanish Beauty shines fond light on Benidorm” THE OBSERVER
“This seedy, sun-kissed literary thriller” THE TIMES
“A bracing fever-dream pulsing to the rhythms of the rotting heart of the Costa Blanca” THE IRISH TIMES
When it was built in the 1950s, nothing symbolised Cyprus entering the modern world like the Ledra Palace Hotel. In Constantia Soteriou’s jewel of a novella, the ambitions and shortcomings of the island’s turbulent twentieth century are played out among its occupants. Among them we meet the king in exile who needs to drown his sorrows with a drink disguised to look like tea; the porter who, among the English roses of the hotel's gardens, secretly plants a rose from his village to make his rosebud infusions with; the UN officer who drinks lemonade to deal with the heat and the lies; and the cleaning lady who always carries her holy water with her. They are reluctant actors in history, evocatively captured in this moving, personal, and highly original portrait of civil strife and division.
“Constantia Souteriou’s Brandy Sour tells guest’s stories in a slim, experimental novel whose flavours bounce off the page and straight into the mouth” THE SUNDAY TIMES
“This is, quite simply, one of the most powerful books ever to come out of our island...
In the powerful vignettes of Brandy Sour, we remember the dreams and struggles of our past. We rediscover our resilience, our perseverance. We see the lives of our parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, sisters and brothers. And, ultimately, we find our own selves reflected on every page.
Brandy Sour is the story of the people of Cyprus. The real people. The real story." CYPRUS MAIL
Brandy Sour won the 2023 National Book Prize in Cyprus and Constantia Soteriou won the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize
“Flavours bounce off the page and straight into the mouth” THE SUNDAY TIMES
“This is, quite simply, one of the most powerful books ever to come out of our island” CYPRUS MAIL
2023 Cyprus National Book Prize Winner
In this tour de force of auto-journalism, Anna Pazos explores the end of youth and the beginning of adulthood for the global nomad generation. We are taken on a journey from the ‘Mediterranean mediocrity’ of bourgeois Barcelona life, through Anna’s unstructured Erasmus days in Thessaloniki, her first steps in journalism in Jerusalem, her sail across the Atlantic with an unsuitable lover, and to post-MeToo, pre-pandemic New York. In 2021, back in Barcelona, she turns her analytical attention on her family, on post-2017 Catalan society, and on her place within it.
This stunning debut was longlisted for the Premi Finestres 2023 and voted best Catalan Book of the Year by El Pais.
“I’m thrilled to know that Anna Pazos’ brilliant memoir is coming out in English! Tumultuous, funny, and secretly sad, in the way that growing up is.” Vicenzo Latronico, author of the International Booker Prize shortlisted PERFECTION
“It powerfully conveys the anxiety, chaos, and disillusionment of a world hurtling towards collapse” Julià Guillamon, LA VANGUARDIA
“Tumultuous, funny, and secretly sad, in the way growing up is.” Vicenzo Latronico
Longlisted for the Premi Finestres 2023 and voted best Catalan Book of the Year by EL PAÍS