Damion Searls, Distinguished Writer in Residence at Wesleyan (2023-24), is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch and a writer in English.
He has translated many classic modern writers, including Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Ingeborg Bachmann, Jon Fosse, Jelinek, Gide, Modiano, Döblin, Walser, Christa Wolf, and Nescio, as well as editing a one-volume abridgment of Henry David Thoreau’s Journal and producing a lost work of Hermann Melville’s. He has published criticism (Harper’s, Bookforum, New Republic), essays (Time, n+1, The Atlantic, The Believer), and poetry (Paris Review, New York Review of Books), and taught at universities (Princeton, Harvard, Wesleyan, Iowa Writers Program) and other venues (NYC Center for Fiction, 92nd St. Y, Naropa).
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 (forthcoming).