Ben Richard Fergusson (born 12 July 1980 in Southampton) is a British writer and translator. He studied English Literature at Warwick University and Modern Languages at Bristol University. Before publishing his first novel he worked for ten years as an editor and publisher in the art world. Fergusson lives with his husband and son in Berlin, where he teaches at the University of Potsdam.

Career

Fergusson's debut novel was ''The Spring of Kasper Meier'' (2014), a literary thriller set in the ruins of post-war Berlin. In 2015, it won the

Betty Trask Award The Betty Trask Prize and Awards are for first novels written by authors under the age of 35, who reside in a current or former Commonwealth nation. Each year the awards total £20,000, with one author receiving a larger prize amount, called the ...

, the HWA Debut Crown, and was shortlisted for the

Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award The Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year award is a literary prize awarded to a British author under the age of 35 for a published work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry. It is administered by the Society of Authors and ha ...

. ''The Spring of Kasper Meier'' was the first novel in a trilogy of books set in the same apartment block in Berlin at different points in the city's twentieth century history. His second novel, ''The Other Hoffmann Sister'' (2017), is partly set in

German South West Africa German South West Africa (german: Deutsch-Südwestafrika) was a colony of the German Empire from 1884 until 1915, though Germany did not officially recognise its loss of this territory until the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. With a total area of ...

, now

Namibia Namibia (, ), officially the Republic of Namibia, is a country in Southern Africa. Its western border is the Atlantic Ocean. It shares land borders with Zambia and Angola to the north, Botswana to the east and South Africa to the south and ea ...

, and Berlin during the

German Revolution of 1918–1919 The German Revolution or November Revolution (german: Novemberrevolution) was a civil conflict in the German Empire at the end of the First World War that resulted in the replacement of the German federal constitutional monarchy with a dem ...

. ''An Honest Man'' (2019), the final book in the trilogy, is a queer

Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...

thriller set in

West Berlin West Berlin (german: Berlin (West) or , ) was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin during the years of the Cold War. Although West Berlin was de jure not part of West Germany, lacked any sovereignty, and was under mi ...

during the summer before the

Fall of the Berlin Wall The fall of the Berlin Wall (german: Mauerfall) on 9 November 1989, during the Peaceful Revolution, was a pivotal event in world history which marked the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the figurative Iron Curtain and one of the series of eve ...

. The latter was a book of the year in ''The Times'', the ''Financial Times'', and the ''Times Literary Supplement''. After

same-sex marriage in Germany Same-sex marriage in Germany has been legal since 1 October 2017. A bill for the legalisation of same-sex marriage passed the Bundestag on 30 June 2017 and the Bundesrat on 7 July. It was signed into law on 20 July by President Frank-Walter Ste ...

was passed by the Bundestag in 2017, Fergusson and his German husband became one of the first same-sex married couples to adopt in the country. In 2022, Fergusson published his first work of non-fiction about this journey, ''Tales from the Fatherland'', which also reflected on the broader social and historical shifts in how families are created and what parenthood means.

Bibliography

* ''The Spring of Kasper Meier'' (2014) * ''The Other Hoffmann Sister'' (2017) * ''An Honest Man'' (2019) * ''Tales from the Fatherland'' (2022)

Awards

* Seán O'Faoláin International Short Story Award 2020 * Stephen Spender Prize 2020 for poetry in translation * 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)

References

1980 births Living people English LGBT writers English LGBT novelists English gay writers English historical novelists 21st-century English novelists 21st-century English LGBT people {{UK-writer-stub