Nichola Smalley

Nichola Smalley is a literary translator based in London, working from Swedish and Norwegian into English. She finished her PhD at UCL in 2014, a study of contemporary urban vernaculars in Swedish and UK rap and literature, before spending time in publishing as Publicity Director at And Other Stories. She settled into full-time translation around 2022, after earlier studies and career detours through medicine, fashion, and publishing.

Her translation work spans literary fiction, non-fiction, and children's books, and she describes her particular love as knotty literary things, tricky language and humour. She translates with attention to rhythm and voice, a skill sharpened by her academic work on slang and vernacular. From the grit of Malmö housing projects to the inventiveness of contemporary Norwegian fiction, her range is wide.

Wretchedness, her rendering of Andrzej Tichý's Swedish novel, is her most recognised work in English. It won the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for translation, was longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, and shortlisted for the Bernard Shaw Prize that same year. She has also translated Jostein Gaarder's An Unreliable Man and Oliver Lovrenski's Back in the Day, among almost twenty other titles.

For a new reader, Wretchedness is the obvious entry point. Its stream-of-consciousness narration moves between a cellist's concert life and the squats and house parties of Malmö's underclass, and Smalley's translation preserves the raw, slang-heavy voice that makes the novel work. It is a book that will not let you look away from people the world tends to ignore.