Damion Searls


Damion Searls is an American writer and translator. He grew up in New York and studied at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. He translates literary works from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch. Among the authors he has translated are Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Hermann Hesse, Kurt Schwitters, Peter Handke, Jon Fosse, Heike B. Görtemaker, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Max Weber, and Nescio. He has received numerous grants and fellowships for his translations.
Searls published The Inkblots, the first English-language biography of Hermann Rorschach, inventor of the Rorschach test, in 2017. He won the Helen and [Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize] in 2019 for Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl.
In April 2022, Searls's English translation of Jon Fosse's novel A New Name: Septology VI-VII was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
Explaining his philosophy of translation, Searls writes, "We don't translate words of a language, we translate uses of language.... In a translation, even what look like divergences or outright mistakes on the single-word level may well be part of what you need to do to re-create the same force in English."
Searls lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Selected works

Author