About

Biography

Ben Fergusson is an award-winning writer and translator. He was born in Southampton in 1980 and grew up near Didcot in Oxfordshire. He studied English Literature at Warwick University, Modern Languages at Bristol University and Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Cardiff Metropolitan University.

Ben's debut novel, The Spring of Kasper Meier, won the 2015 Betty Trask Prize for an outstanding debut novel by a writer under 35 and the HWA Debut Crown 2015 for the best historical fiction debut of the year. It was also shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and longlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award, while being selected for the Waterstone’s Book Club, WHSmith Fresh Talent and the BBC Radio 2 Book Club.

The second and third books in Ben's Berlin trilogy are The Other Hoffmann Sister, published in 2017, and An Honest Man, published in 2019, which was selected by The Sunday Times, the TLS and the Financial Times as one of the best books of the year. In 2022, he published his first book of non-fiction, Tales from the Fatherland, an exploration of same-sex parenthood.

Ben's short fiction has been twice longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award and twice shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and in 2020 he won the Seán O'Faoláin International Short Story Prize for his story 'A Navigable River'. He has translated numerous essays, poems and short stories from German for publishers internationally, including texts by Daniel Kehlmann, Daniel Schreiber, Alain Claude Sulzer, Byung-Chul Han and Antja Wagner and in 2020 won a Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation. His journalism on culture and fatherhood has appeared in The Guardian, Frieze and The World of Interiors among other publications.

Awards

Fiction
Betty Trask Prize 2015
HWA Debut Crown 2015
Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2015 (shortlist)
Authors' Club Best First Novel Award 2015 (longlist)

Short Fiction
Seán O'Faoláin International Short Story Award 2020
BBC National Short Story Award 2020 (longlist)
BBC National Short Story Award 2019 (longlist)
Bridport Short Fiction Prize 2018 (shortlist)
Bridport Short Fiction Prize 2010 (shortlist)
Chroma Short Fiction Award 2008 (runner-up)

Translation
Stephen Spender Prize 2020 for poetry in translation

Juries

Berlin Writing Prize 2022
HWA Debut Crown 2018 (chair)
HWA Debut Crown 2017
IGGY and Litro Writing Prize 2015

Contact

You can contact Ben directly by email here. You can also follow Ben on Twitter @BenFergusson and Instagram ben_fergusson_

For enquiries related to An Honest Man, The Other Hoffman Sister, The Spring of Kasper Meier or Tales from the Fatherland please contact: Little, Brown Book Group, tel: +44 (0) 20 3122 7000, email: LBBG.info@littlebrown.co.uk

For all other enquiries about Ben’s fiction, please contact Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown, tel: +44 (0) 20 7393 4428, email: suttonoffice@curtisbrown.co.uk