Peter Wortsman

Peter Wortsman is the author of a novel (Cold Earth Wanderers, 2014), thee collections of stories (A Modern Way to Die, 1991, second edition, 2019, Footprints in Wet Cement, 2017, and Stimme und Atem/Out of Breath, Out of Mind, forthcoming in 2019), two stage plays (Burning Words, premiered in 2006, and in German translation in 2014, and The Tattooed Man Tells All, first staged in 2018), a travel memoir (Ghost Dance in Berlin, 2013), as well as a work of nonfiction (The Caring Heirs of Doctor Samuel Bard, 2019).

Wortsman is also a literary translator from the German into English of works by von Chamisso, the Brothers Grimm, Heine, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kafka, Kleist, Musil, and Mynona, among others.

He was a 1973 Fulbright Fellow at the Albert Ludwig Universität in Freiburg im Breisgau, a 1974 Fellow of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation in Vienna, and a 2010 Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

His travel texts have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other major newspapers, and were included five years in a row in The Best Travel Writing, 2008-2012, and again in 2016.

His interviews with survivors of the Nazi concentration camps can be found in the "Peter Wortsman Collection of Oral History" at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.