Sarah Puntan-Galea

Half Welsh and half Maltese, London born’n’bred Sarah Puntan-Galea is a strategic communications professional who was appointed Valleys to Coast’s Communications Director in April.

She studied political science at Liverpool University (where she was elected President of its students’ union), before postgraduate courses in journalism and then economics in London – and is currently an international relations research student at Malta University.

She started her journalism career at The Telegraph then Sky TV in London, before working for The Independent and The Sunday Times in Malta, where she edited its magazine (named ‘Magazine of the Year’ several times under her editorship). She scooped the ‘Columnist of the Year’ award for her foreign affairs column, and presented and produced a weekly radio show before going to work for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Sarah was the Deputy Director of the prestigious Ditchley Foundation in Oxfordshire, before heading HM The Queen’s communications strategy during her last overseas engagement to Malta for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 2015. She then joined Malta’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs as Spokesperson for the Foreign Minister, before Malta’s Prime Minister poached her to be his Spokesperson and Head of International Media for the government.

In the run-up to being posted to New York as Communications Lead for Malta’s bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council, she lost her Welsh mother to COVID which made her reassess her work-life situation and take a role back in her motherland. Now she proudly works with great people doing great things for others – and is reorganising a communications department to achieve even greater things. But most importantly, not working 16-hour days and weekends allows her time to live rurally and do the things she loves most: Hike, birdwatch, read, and write her taking-forever-to-finish novel!