Nicola Mira is a writer of fiction and non-fiction and a translator from Italian, French and Spanish.

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.

He 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, Nicola attended the Literary Translation Summer School (Italian to English) at City, University of London.

In 2024, Nicola attended the Literary Translation and Creative Writing Summer School (Italian to English) at the British Centre for Literary Translation – UEA.

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 is at an advanced stage, thanks also the contribution of two consulting editors, and Nicola is currently seeking representation, while also working on his second novel, Circle, the story of a talented young woman who refuses to let a man’s violence define her life.

His other writing highlights include:

•  Four years (2015-2019) as crime fiction reviewer for Thriller Books Journal
• 16 years (from 2008 to the present) as editor and main writer at sports statistics website Greatest Sporting Nation
• In 2022, Nicola was a finalist at Byte Shorts, Byte the Book’s flash fiction competition, with his short story Shallows.

Nicola translates texts from a range of industries, with fashion journalism his main specialism. He has translated 3,800-plus articles (and counting) for FashionNetwork.com, a leading global publisher of fashion news and market insights.

He has also worked on a variety of marketing and product texts for fashion labels like Kiton, Tezenis, Ermanno Scervino, Boohoo, D&G Kids and La Martina.

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.

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).

For publisher Meyer & Meyer Sport, Nicola has translated (from Italian) The Functional Training Bible by Guido Bruscia (2014).

Nicola has contributed to ‘In Other Words’, the journal of the British Centre for Literary Translation, and to London literary magazine Litro, where he also published a translation of an excerpt from Italian early 20th century author Gabriele D’Annunzio.