Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch and a writer in English.
He has translated books by Nobel Prize winners Thomas Mann, Elfriede Jelinek, Hermann Hesse, Gide, Modiano, and Jon Fosse, as well as many other classic modern writers: Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Bachmann, Döblin, Robert Walser, Christa Wolf, Victoria Kielland, and Nescio. He has edited a one-volume abridgment of Henry David Thoreau’s Journal and produced a lost work of Hermann Melville’s; 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.