Peter Wortsman

Dubbed a "20th-century Brother Grimm" (Bloomsbury Review) and "a delinquent Hans Christian Andersen" (by playwright Mark O'Donnell), Peter Wortsman was saluted by the late Hubert Selby, Jr. (author of Last Exit to Brooklyn) as "an excellent artist...Wortsman [succeeds] so well in his craft and art that it reads 'artless' and 'spontaneous,' which to me is the highest of compliments." The Boston Phoenix wrote: "Wortsman hangs with the masters."

He is the author of a novel, Cold Earth Wanderers (Pelekenesis, 2014 -- a finalist for the 2014 INDIEFAB Science Fiction Book of the Year; three books of short fiction, A Modern Way to Die (Fromm Int'l, 1991, second edition, Pelekinesis, 2019), Footprints in Wet Cement (Pelekinesis, 2017), and Stimme und Atem/ Out of Breath, Out of Mind, a bilimgual German-English collection (Palm Art Presz, Berlin); a limited edition artists' book, it-t=i, produced in collaboration with his brother, artist Harold Wortsman, comprising his prose poetry and his brother's etchings (here and now press, 2004) -- haled by the librarian of The Library of Congress as of the notable artist books of the year; a travel memoir, Ghost Dance in Berlin, A Rhapsody in Gray (Travelers' Tales, 2013) -- for which he won an Independent Publishers Book Award; three books of poetry, Borrowed Words (Bamboo Dart Press, 2021, Driftwood at the River's Edge (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022), and The Laboratory of Time (Bamboo Dart Press, forthcoming, 2025); two books of nonfiction, Epiphany of a Middle-Aged Pilgrim, Essays in Lieu of a Memoir (Pelekinesis, 2021) and The Caring Heirs of Doctor Samuel Bard (Columbia University Press, 2019); an anthology, Tales of the German Imagination, From the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, which he compiled, edited and translated from German (Penguin Classics, UK, 2013), and most recently, Odd Birds & Fat Cats (An Urban Bestiary) (Turtle Point Press, 2024).

He has also written two stage plays, Burning Words, premiered by the Hampshire Shakespeare Company at the Northampton Center for the Arts, in Northampton, Mass., in 2006, and produced and published in German translation, at the Kulturhaus Osterfeld, in Pforzheim, Germany, in 2014; and The Tattooed Man Tells All, premiered by the Silverthorne Theater at the Hawks and Reed Performing Arts Center, in /greenfield, Mass, 2020, and in German translation at the Deutsches Theater in Goettimgen, Germany, where it ran for eight months, October 2021 to May 2022, and was published in a biimgual German-English edition (Palm rt Press, Berlin, 2024).

His many English translations from the German include: Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, by Robert Musil, now in its third edition (Eridanos, 1987, Penguin 20th-Century Classics, 1995; Archipelago Books, 2006); Peter Schlemiel, by Adelbert von Chamisso (Fromm Int'l, 1993); Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg (Archipelago, 2007); Travel Pictures, by Heinrich Heine (Archipelago, 2008); Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist (Archipelago, 2010); Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm (Archipelago, 2013); The Creator, by Mynona, aka Salomo Friedlaender (Wakefield Press, 2014); Konundrum, Selected Prose of Franz Kafka (Archipelago Books, 2016), and most recently, The Golden Pot and other tales of the uncanny, by E.T.A. Hoffmann ( (Archipelago Books, 2023) -- shortlisted for the 2024 Helene and Kurt Wolff Translatiom Prize.

Also a travel writer, his work has appeared in major newspapers, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, as well as magazines and websites, and was selected five years in a row for The Best Travel Writing, 2008-2012 and again in 2016. New Word City issued two short eBooks of his travel writing, The Urban Nomad - Paris, and The Urban Nomad - Vienna.

His essays have appeared, in German translation, in Die Welt, Die Zeit, The Atlantic Times, and Cicero, Magazin für Politische Kultur.

His prose poetry has appeared in various anthologies, including The Best of the Prose Poem: An International Journal, Providence, RI, and White Pine Press, Buffalo, NY, 2000; 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, New York University Press, NY, 2002; The House of Your Dream: An International Collection of Prose Poetry, White Pine Press, Buffalo, NY 2008; and Short, An International Anthology, Persea Books, NY 2014.

He was the recipient of the 1985 Beard's Fund Short Story Award and the 2008 Gertje Potash-Suhr Prose Prize of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German. A former Fellow of the Fulbright (1973) and Thomas J. Watson (1974) Foundations, he was the Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in Spring 2010.