I translate from Italian and French into English, with a particular interest in literary fiction and nonfiction, academic texts and tabletop board games. Please do get in touch to discuss possible translation projects, enquire about my rates or request a sample of my work.
Recent published translations include The Tearsmith (Fabbricante di Lacrime) by Erin Doom, a bestselling young adult romance published by Penguin in 2024; The New Job and The Owl, from Anna Ruchat's Swiss Literature Prize-winning collection, Gli anni di Nettuno sulla terra (Neptune's Years on Earth), co-translated with Lucy Rand for Strangers Press; and various nonfiction pieces for The Passenger, a book-magazine that brings together long reads, investigative journalism, literary reportage and narrative essays.
Recent published translations include The Tearsmith (Fabbricante di Lacrime) by Erin Doom, a bestselling young adult romance published by Penguin in 2024; The New Job and The Owl, from Anna Ruchat's Swiss Literature Prize-winning collection, Gli anni di Nettuno sulla terra (Neptune's Years on Earth), co-translated with Lucy Rand for Strangers Press; and various nonfiction pieces for The Passenger, a book-magazine that brings together long reads, investigative journalism, literary reportage and narrative essays.
Other current translation projects, seeking an English-language publisher, include:
To Report: Nothing Else (Altro nulla da segnalare) by Francesca Valente (Einaudi 2022).
In 1978, at the height of the anti-psychiatry movement, Italy became the first nation in the world to ban mental institutions and replace them with community-based psychiatric care. To Report: Nothing Else, the unanimous winner of the Italo Calvino Prize 2021, is a highly original, polyvocal work of creative nonfiction that offers an insightful, nuanced glimpse into this important piece of social history.
Francesca Valente skilfully interweaves short excerpts from the reports made by the nurses working on one of the first, radical ‘open’ mental health wards in the early 1980s with sensitive, lyrical prose that thoughtfully conveys the joys, the challenges and sometimes the paradoxical banality of this newly-won freedom. Delicately stepping into the lives of the patients, doctors and nurses who made this groundbreaking history – that remains, as of yet, largely inaccessible to Anglophone readers – To Report: Nothing Else pushes back against ‘the supposed inevitability of carceral approaches to mental health’ (Micha Frazer-Carroll, Mad World, Pluto Press 2023). Poignantly told with humour, anger, and most of all, respect and compassion, the stories in this work grew out of the author’s interviews with radical psychiatrist, Luciano Sorrentino, or from the nurses’ notes, which often ended with the titular phrase ‘to report: nothing else’. They ask critical, timely questions about the shaky boundaries between health and illness, freedom and confinement, discomfort and fulfilment, moving between fragments of uncovered pasts and glimmers of potential futures.
In 1978, at the height of the anti-psychiatry movement, Italy became the first nation in the world to ban mental institutions and replace them with community-based psychiatric care. To Report: Nothing Else, the unanimous winner of the Italo Calvino Prize 2021, is a highly original, polyvocal work of creative nonfiction that offers an insightful, nuanced glimpse into this important piece of social history.
Francesca Valente skilfully interweaves short excerpts from the reports made by the nurses working on one of the first, radical ‘open’ mental health wards in the early 1980s with sensitive, lyrical prose that thoughtfully conveys the joys, the challenges and sometimes the paradoxical banality of this newly-won freedom. Delicately stepping into the lives of the patients, doctors and nurses who made this groundbreaking history – that remains, as of yet, largely inaccessible to Anglophone readers – To Report: Nothing Else pushes back against ‘the supposed inevitability of carceral approaches to mental health’ (Micha Frazer-Carroll, Mad World, Pluto Press 2023). Poignantly told with humour, anger, and most of all, respect and compassion, the stories in this work grew out of the author’s interviews with radical psychiatrist, Luciano Sorrentino, or from the nurses’ notes, which often ended with the titular phrase ‘to report: nothing else’. They ask critical, timely questions about the shaky boundaries between health and illness, freedom and confinement, discomfort and fulfilment, moving between fragments of uncovered pasts and glimmers of potential futures.
Ten Almost True Stories (Dieci storie quasi vere) by Daniela Gambaro. Nutrimenti (2020).
The prize-winning literary debut by Italian screenwriter Daniela Gambaro. Each of the deftly written, deceptively simple and tonally varied stories in this collection revolves around the central themes of motherhood and the delicate precarity at the heart of family life.
From a seemingly happy family digging up their garden in search of their son’s lost tortoise, to a young mother returning to her hometown under the clouds of post-partum depression, and a Filipino babysitter who only eats fried chicken and dreams of becoming a nun, all of Gambaro’s protagonists offer a snapshot into the intense and ambiguous ripples of emotion that underlie seemingly normal moments of everyday life.
