Silvester Mazzarella is a literary translator and biographer, born 1936: English mother and Italian father.

He matriculated in 1956 and followed his mother in reading English at the Hall, scraping a Second in 1959. As a lecturer in the English Department at Helsinki University, Finland and reviewer of British books for a leading Finnish newspaper (1965-88), he took a special interest in Finland’s second language, Swedish. Back in England from 1988, he read Italian at the University of Kent in Canterbury, taking a First in Italian there in 1995. It was only after 2000 that he started translating books into English, first from Swedish and later from Italian.