A pause. 'Ah, Herr Fergusson. It's Frau Schwenk.' Our social worker, I now understood. 'Thank you for getting back to me. I'm calling because we have a little boy, four weeks old, who needs a family.' In 2018, after the introduction of marriage equality in Germany, Ben Fergusson and his German husband Tom became one of the first same-sex married couples to adopt in the country. In Tales from the Fatherland Fergusson reflects on his long journey to fatherhood and the social changes that enabled it. He uses his outsider status as both a gay father and a parent adopting in a foreign country to explore the history and sociology of fatherhood and motherhood around the world, queer parenting and adoption and, ultimately, the meaning of family and love. Tales from the Fatherland makes an impassioned case for the value of diversity in family life, arguing that diverse families are good for all families and that misogyny lies at the heart of many of the struggles of straight and queer families alike.
Author
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 and Modern Languages at Bristol University and has worked as an editor, translator and publisher in London and Berlin. He currently teaches creative writing in Berlin and is a doctoral researcher at the University of East Anglia. 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 will publish 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, Alain Claude Sulzer, Byung-Chul Han and Antja Wagner and in 2020 won a Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation.
