Peter Wortsman

Peter Wortsman is a writer and translator from the German. Among his many translations of German-language classics are Robert Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemiel: The Man Who Sold His Shadow, Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg, Heinrich Heine’s Travel-pictures, Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Salomo Friedlaender (Mynona), The Creator, Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka, and Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, which he also edited. His most recent translation, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot and other tales of the uncanny, was shortlisted for the 2024 Helene and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize.

Wortsman also publishes fiction and nonfiction, stage plays, poetry, and travel writing. His fiction includes the novel Cold Earth Wanderers (2014) and two short-story collections, A Modern Way to Die (1991) and Footprints in Wet Cement (2017). His plays have been produced in the U.S. and Germany, and his travel memoir, Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray, won a 2014 Independent Publishers Book Award. He has also written personal essays, collected as Epiphany of a Middle-Aged Pilgrim, Essays in Lieu of a Memoir (2021) and co-authored, with his brother Harold Wortsman, the artists’ book, it-t=i  (2005). Wortsman received the 1985 Beard's Fund Short Story Award and the 2008 Geertje Potash-Suhr Prose Prize of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German. He has been a  Fulbright and Thomas J. Watson Fellow and a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2010. He lives in New York City.

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