News

Biography Fellows Susan Bernofsky und Damion Searls.

The Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center is pleased to announce its four 2012-2013 Biography Fellows: Susan Bernofsky, for a biography of the Swiss-German writer Robert Walser; Langdon Hammer, for a biography of the poet James Merrill; Siobhan Roberts, for a biography of the mathematician John Horton Conway; and Damion Searls, for a biography of the Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach. Each fellow receives a generous grant, writing space and library privileges, and participates in seminars and the events and intellectual life of the CUNY Graduate Center.
Susan Bernofsky has translated 18 books, including six by the Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, and novels by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Gregor von Rezzori, and others. She is Chair of the PEN Translation Committee and sits on the PEN board. She received the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize and the 2012 Calwer Hermann Hesse Translation Prize, as well as awards and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the PEN Translation Fund, the NEA, the NEH, and the Lannan Foundation. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton, and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Washington University. She is also the author of Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe.
Damion Searls is the author of Everything You Say Is True, a travelogue, and What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, a collection of stories. He has written for Harper’s, The Believer, n+1, The Paris Review, Bookforum, Brick, and others, and is the editor of Thoreau’s The Journal: 1837-1861. He is an award-winning translator from German, French, Dutch, and Norwegian, including books by Proust, Rilke, Ingeborg Bachmann, Hans Keilson, and Nescio, as well as biographies of Anne Frank’s family and of Martin Kippenberger. His forthcoming translations include a collection of stories by Robert Walser, the last novel by Christa Wolf, and a new translation of Hermann Hesse’s Demian.
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