Thom Sliwowski, PhD

WRITING
EDITING & PROOFREADING
TRANSLATION

I am a writer living in Berlin. In my essays, stories, and reviews, I look for the elegance in lesser-known histories and misundertood phenomena. My writing has appeared in the LA Review of Books, in Sidecar, the Public Domain Review, and in the online editions of The Paris Review, Granta Magazine, and The Baffler.

I hold a PhD from UC Berkeley, where I wrote a dissertation about the counterintuitive ways that some novelists from socialist Poland and East Germany imagined historical time. You can read my dissertation’s abstract here.

I translate between German, English, French, and Polish and have worked as a simultaneous interpreter for clients ranging from poets to politicians.

I am also an editor and proofreader for academic and trade manuscripts, and you can find testimonials about my work here.

Why Plum Lunch? It’s simple:

My surname is an an adjectival form of the Polish word for “plum.”

And because I cycle and swim a lot, most days I eat lunch twice.