‘I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.’ J.L. Borges
SERVICES
Translation, editing and proof-reading
Nicola’s go-to CAT tool is Trados Studio 2024, and he is proficient also in MemoQ
Nicola does not use generative AI for his translation work
He is experienced in managing HTML-XML texts and working with online CMSs.
Translator
Nicola is a translator from Italian, French and Spanish into English and awriter of fiction and non-fiction.
He was educated in the UK (BA Politics & Economics, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford), and has lived and worked in Italy, France and the UK, first in London and now in Cambridge.
He started his career as a linguist and writer by putting to good use his language skills (he is fluent in English, Italian and French, speaks passable Spanish and has studied Mandarin Chinese, Russian and German), becoming a freelance translator in 2012. Since then, he has translated over 4.7 million words into English, working on business, journalism, academic, literary, and general non-fiction texts.
Nicola has been involved in the Translators in Schools programme and the Translation Nation and The Big Translate projects.
He has also worked as simultaneous interpreter and has taught English as a foreign language to secondary school and adult students, working with educational institutions and agencies in Italy.
Nicola has a Diploma in Translation (Italian to English, 2017) from the Chartered Institute of Linguists and is a member of the Society of Authors/Translators Association and English PEN.
In 2017, he attended the Literary Translation Summer School (Italian to English) at City, University of London.
In 2024, he attended the Literary Translation and Creative Writing Summer School (Italian to English) at the British Centre for Literary Translation – University of East Anglia.
Nicola has been a member of proz.com, an online community and workplace for language professionals,since 2014.
Translations portfolio
FASHION
For FashionNetwork.com, a leading global publisher of fashion news and market insights, he has translated 4,000-plus articles (and counting, for over 3 million words) from Italian, French and Spanish since 2015.
He has translated marketing and product texts for fashion labels like Kiton, Tezenis, Ermanno Scervino, Boohoo, D&G Kids and La Martina.
NON-FICTION
For MuSa, the museum of the town of Salò, Italy, Nicola has translated from Italian:
Federico Fellini. From sketch artist to film director, the catalogue for an exhibition of Federico Fellini’s drawings (2025)
The Final Winter. 1943-1945. From Resistance to Liberation, a 24,000-word photographic history of the anti-fascist Resistance in the province of Brescia, northern Italy (2025).
For publisher Meyer & Meyer Sport, Nicola has translated (from Italian) The Functional Training Bible by Guido Bruscia (2014).
ACADEMIC
Nicola has a strong portfolio of academic translations to his name, chiefly in the Humanities (history and philosophy).
Among his translations (from Italian) for Prof. S. Plastina:
‘Clio’s Daughters: British Female Historians of the XVIIIth century’, published in an anthology by Aschendorff Verlag, Munster 2019
‘Is Francesco Patrizi’s L’Amorosa Filosofia a Heterodox Reading of the Symposium?’, published on the Intellectual History Review, issue 29/4 2019
Several papers on Italian women philosophers of the Renaissance.
Other academic texts Nicola has translated/edited from Italian include:
an article by L. M. Tissi (Université Paris -Sorbonne) on ‘Sanctuary Doors, Vestibules and Adyta in the Works of Neoplatonic Philosophers’, published in E. M. van Opstall’s ‘Sacred Thresholds. The Door to the Sanctuary in Late Antiquity’, Leiden-Boston 2018
a paper on Polemics in the Pseudoplatonica by Marco Donato (Aix-Marseille University) for the December 2018 ‘Polemics, Rivalry and Networking in Greco-Roman Antiquity’ conference at KU Leuven
a paper on the didactics of art by Prof. Valeria Nuzzo (Università degli studi di Salerno, Dipartimento di Scienze Umane, Filosofiche e della Formazione).
OTHER
Nicola has published the translation of an excerpt from Licenza, by Italian early 20th century author Gabriele D’Annunzio on London literary magazine Litro, where he also published an essay on translation (Hades’s Ferryman: How a Translator Assists Meaning’s Perilous Journey, 2015)
Author
Nicola is a writer of fiction and non-fiction.
He was educated in the UK (BA Politics & Economics, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford), and has lived and worked in Italy, France and the UK, first in London and now in Cambridge.
He started his writing career by putting to good use his linguistic skills (he is fluent in English, Italian and French, speaks passable Spanish and has studied Mandarin Chinese, Russian and German), becoming a freelance translator in 2012. Since then, he has translated over 4.7 million words from Italian, French and Spanish into English.
While establishing himself as a translator, Nicola has worked as copywriter (2013-14) for content production agencies like Quill and others.
Nicola is a member of the Churchill College writing group, a thoughtful, diverse and welcoming group led by Rosie Johnston which meets regularly in Cambridge. Joining the group in 2021 has greatly helped Nicola’s writing, adding a key new dimension to his practice as author.
Fiction
In 2020, Nicola began writing his first novel, Hydra, a psychological drama that was shortlisted for an Escalator mentorship by the National Centre for Writing. The manuscript (98,000 words) is at an advanced stage, thanks also the contribution of two consulting editors.
Work on his second novel, Circle, the story of a talented young woman who refuses to let a man’s violence define her life, is also progressing well, and he is editing the first draft of the manuscript (77,000 words).
Publications
Nicola’s writing has been published on:
In Other Words (the journal of the British Centre for Literary Translation)
Churchill Review
The Churchill Writers Anthology (out spring 2026)
Literary magazine Litro
Thriller Books Journal, to which he contributed as crime fiction reviewer between 2015 and 2019
Greatest Sporting Nation, a sports statistics website for which Nicola has been the editor and main writer for 17 years (from 2008 to the present)
In 2022, Nicola was a finalist at Byte Shorts, Byte the Book’s flash fiction competition, with his short story Shallows.
CURRENTLY READING
A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel (1992)
Ripeness, Sarah Moss (2025)
The Most Secret Memory of Men, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (2021), translated Lara Vergnaud (2023)
The Roof Beneath Their Feet, Geetanjali Shree (2001), translated Rahul Soni (2013)
Il senso della natura, Paolo Pecere (2024)
Features
Crime Fiction: a Personal History – post 1 of 10
Sophocles, Shakespeare, Poe?
This is the first post in my very own history of CRIME FICTION, featuring some of the most captivating works I’ve read. I’m defining the genre broadly, to include noir, mystery and even tragedy. Since it’s based on my own reading experience, this ‘history’ is of course limited, and other suggestions and ideas are welcome!
Why do we love crime fiction? Because we yearn for the order a successful investigation brings to the world. We live in constant chaos (some of us at least) so reading about criminals being caught restores some of our peace of mind. As such, I think crime fiction’s roots lie deep in the history of storytelling.
Ancient Greek tragedy is one of the earliest examples of storytelling in the West, and the tragedy I believe is closest to a crime story is Oedipus Tyrannus, the most famous work by SOPHOCLES (first performed as a play around 429 BC): Oedipus, the son of Laius, king of Thebes, hunts for his father’s killer without knowing it is he himself who unwittingly murdered him, and afterwards had sex with his own mother Iocaste. Oedipus blinds himself in desperation when he discovers the truth, while Iocaste hangs herself.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE is hailed as the master storyteller in the English-speaking world, and has produced some genre-defining tragedies. The one nearest to a crime story in the modern sense is arguably Hamlet: a young man sent by his father’s ghost to avenge his murder, Hamlet will discover the truth about his father’s death after a tragic journey featuring (more) murder, madness and unrequited love.
US author EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849) is regarded by many as the father of crime/mystery fiction in its modern form. He was a writer of genius whose work crossed over multiple genres to include horror and the supernatural, and my favourites are a haunting short story, Ligeia, and a narrative poem, The Raven, over and above The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the short story published in 1841 that is considered to be the first modern detective story.
In post # 2: A. Conan Doyle and the golden age of British crime fiction.
Crime Fiction: a Personal History – post 2 of 10
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Brief excerpts from Hades’s Ferryman and In Other Words article
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