Peter Wortsman

Image © Ricky Owens

Peter Wortsman is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, poet, playwright, travel writer, and translator from German. His two plays were produced in the U.S. and Germany: “Burning Words,” based on Wortsman’s translation of Recommendation Whether to Burn all Jewish Books,” a landmark call for religious tolerance, written by German Humanist, Johannes Reuchlin, in 1510, debuted at the Northampton Center for the Arts, in 2006; “The Tattooed Man Tells All,” based on interviews he conducted, most in German, with aging survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, was first performed in the U.S. by the Silverthorne Theater, at the Northampton Center for the Arts, in 2020, and then in German translation, at the Deutsches Theater in Göttingen, in 2022. One of his four books of poetry published to date, The Laboratory of Time, inspired Berlin-based trumpeter Paul Brody, and Oldenburg-based tenor to join forces to compose an album of songs of the same title, the song lyrics drawn directly from his poetry. Notable among his four books of fiction are Stimme und Atem/ Out of Breath, Out of Mind, a bilingual (German/English) collection, and the novel, Cold Earth Wanders (Pelekinesis, 2014), a finalist for the Foreword Reviews’ 2014 INDIEFAB Science fiction Book of the Year Award. His travel memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin, a Rhapsody inGray (Travelers’ Tales, 2014) was awarded an Independent Publishers Book Award. Wortsman collaborated with his brother, Harold Wortsman, on an artists’ book, it-t=i (here and now press, 2005), and with his daughter, Aurélie Bernard Wortsman, on a modern-day bestiary, Odd Birds & Fat Cats (Turtle Point Press (2024).

Among his critically acclaimed translations of German language classics are: Robert Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, 2006, 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, Konundrum, Selected Prose of Franz Kafka, all published by Archipelago Books, and Tales of the German Imagination Books, an anthology he also compiled and edited for Penguin Classics, UK, in 2016. His selection and translation, The Golden Pot and other tales of the uncanny, by E.T.A. Hoffmann, (Archipelago Books, 2024) was shortlisted for the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize. Wortsman has also taken it upon himself to reintroduce forgotten literary gems, like The Creator, by Salomo Friedlaender (Mynona), and letters selected from some 10,000 written by the Berlin literary salonière, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, I Just Let Life Rain Down on Me, Selected Letters of Rahel Levin Varnhagen (Seagull Books, Kolkata, India, 2024). A Fulbright fellow in Freiburg in 1973, a Thomas J. Watson Fellow in Vienna 1974, and a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2010, 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.