Guests and Ghosts

Participants

• Jonas Hassen Khemiri Author

  Jonas Hassen Khemiri is the author of six novels, seven plays, and a collection of essays and short stories. His work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages and his plays are performed worldwide. He received the Village Voice Obie Award for his debut play Invasion! and has been a finalist for the August Prize, Sweden’s most prestigious national book award, three times, winning it once for his novel Everything I Don’t Remember. His novel The Family Clause was a finalist for the National Book Award and won France’s Prix Médicis Étranger. The Sisters, his first book written in English, was published by FSG in 2025 and was named one of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year and longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction. A former Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, Khemiri now teaches in the MFA program at NYU.

• Michael Lentz Author

  Michael Lentz is a distinguished author and musician known for his experimental texts and sound poetry. Lentz’s prolific output spans novels, short stories, plays, radio dramas, poetry, and compositions for a variety of ensembles. His 2007 novel, Pazifik Exil (S. Fischer Verlag), explored the German-speaking exile community in Los Angeles around figures such as Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Arnold Schoenberg. Since 2006, Lentz has served as Professor of Creative Writing at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. He has received numerous awards, including the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (2001) and the Walter Hasenclever Literature Prize (2012). His most recent novel, Schattenfroh. Ein Requiem (S. Fischer Verlag), was published to critical acclaim. Lentz lives in Berlin and Leipzig.

• Tanja Paar Author

  Tanja Paar writes prose, plays, and essays. She studied philosophy, German, and history in Graz, Lausanne, and Vienna, where she now lives and writes, working for theatre and various publications. Her books include The Trembling World (2020), The Unscathed (Haymon Verlag, 2018), and Am Semmering (2025). She has received numerous awards and prizes for her writing, including the Elias Canetti Scholarship and the Robert Gernhardt Prize. Her blog, Mama geht studieren [Mama’s Going to Uni], described her experience studying computer sciences. Tanja Paar’s work incorporates different disciplines and media. In 2024, she was a fellow of the Literature Forum at the Brecht House in Berlin.

• Laura Vogt Author

  Laura Vogt studied cultural studies and creative writing. Her fourth novel, Das Jahr des Kalks, was published in 2026. Her two previous novels have been translated into English: Woman, Idle and What Concerns Us. Her work has been recognized with various grants and scholarships, most recently in 2025 with a scholarship from the Kunst + Kultur Foundation as part of the German Prize for Nature Writing. She lives with her family near St. Gallen, Switzerland.

• Alta L. Price Moderator

  Alta L. Price runs a publishing consultancy specialized in literature and nonfiction texts on art, architecture, design, and culture. Price’s work was awarded the 2013 Gutekunst Prize, and has been featured on BBC Radio 4, the European Literature Network, Specimen, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Of the more than 40 books Price has translated from Italian and German, novelist Juli Zeh’s New Year was a finalist for both the 2022 PEN America Translation Prize and the Helen & Kurt Wolff Prize. Price’s most recent translations include Mithu Sanyal’s Identitti (Astra House, 2022), Zeh’s About People (World Editions, 2023), Giorgio Agamben’s What I Saw, Heard, Learned… (Seagull Books, 2023), Alberto Giacometti’s selected family letters, Time Passes Too Soon (Scheidegger & Spiess, 2024), André Butzer’s Friedrich Hölderlin: The Seasons (Taschen, 2025), and Gesche Würfel’s The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall (Distanz, 2025). Price received a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship for Maddalena Fingerle’s Lingua madre.

• Peter Wortsman Recipient, 2026 Friedrich Ulfers Prize

  Peter Wortsman is a writer and translator from the German. Among his many translations of German-language classics are Robert Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemiel: The Man Who Sold His Shadow, Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg, Heinrich Heine’s Travel-pictures, Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Salomo Friedlaender (Mynona), The Creator, Konundrum: Selected Prose of Franz Kafka, and Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, which he also edited. His most recent translation, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot and Other Tales of the Uncanny, was shortlisted for the 2024 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize.
  
  Wortsman also publishes fiction and nonfiction, stage plays, poetry, and travel writing. His fiction includes the novel Cold Earth Wanderers (2014) and two short-story collections, A Modern Way to Die (1991) and Footprints in Wet Cement (2017). His plays have been produced in the U.S. and Germany, and his travel memoir, Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray, won a 2014 Independent Publishers Book Award. He has also written personal essays, collected as Epiphany of a Middle-Aged Pilgrim, Essays in Lieu of a Memoir (2021) and co-authored, with his brother Harold Wortsman, the artists’ book, it-t=i (2005). Wortsman received the 1985 Beard's Fund Short Story Award and the 2008 Geertje Potash-Suhr Prose Prize of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German. He has been a Fulbright and Thomas J. Watson Fellow and a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2010. He lives in New York City.

• Priska Juschka Laudator, 2026 Friedrich Ulfers Prize

  Priska Juschka is a New York-based curator, writer, and co-founder and director of Lichtundfire (since 2015), a gallery and exhibition space with a distinct cultural program on New York City’s Lower East Side (175 Rivington Street, NY, NY 10002). Born and raised in former West Germany, she studied Humanities at the Free University (FU) in West Berlin, Germany (1985-1990), before relocating in 1992. Since moving to New York City, Juschka has been working as a studio director, artist liaison, independent curator, art consultant, and gallery director. She was an early member of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), a Member of ArtTable, a professional organization dedicated to advancing the leadership of women in the Viusal Arts, and a Member of the Williamsburg Gallery Association (WGA) in the early 2000’s.
  
  In the past 11 years, Juschka has conceived and curated more than 100 exhibitions at Lichtundfire, and moderated panels and talks based on social and cultural topics and the underlying human condition. She writes essays on visual art, especially for artist monographs and biographies. As director of Lichtundfire, Priska Juschka has hosted readings and book launches for Peter Wortsman as part of its continuing cultural program connecting creative fields beyond the Visual Arts.