Damion Searls

Damion Searls is a translator from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch and a writer in English. He was longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize with Jon Fosse, for The Other Name: Septology I-II, and shortlisted in 2022 for A New Name: Septology VI-VII, which was also a shortlisted finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award; Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023. Searls has received Guggenheim, Cullman Center, and two NEA fellowships, and the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize for Hans Keilson's Comedy in a Minor Key, the PEN Center USA Translation Award for Jon Fosse's Aliss at the Fire, and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for Uwe Johnson's four-volume Anniversaries, among other awards. He has also edited a one-volume abridgment of Henry David Thoreau’s Journal; his own books include What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going (stories), The Inkblots (a history of the Rorschach Test and biography of its creator, Hermann Rorschach, which has been translated into ten languages), and The Philosophy of Translation.

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