Ann Cotten


Ann Cotten is an American-born Austrian writer.

Life and work

At the age of five, Cotten moved to Vienna with her parents, who are both biochemists who worked in Vienna.
She finished university there in 2006 with a work about concrete poetry. At the same time she first emerged as a poet at poetry slams.
In 2007 Cotten, whose work has been published in anthologies and poetry journals, found considerable success as a writer with her first book, Fremdwörterbuchsonnette, which was published at Suhrkamp. Other books with Suhrkamp are Florida-Räume in 2001, Der schaudernde Fächer in 2013, Verbann!Versepos in 2016.
Some of Cotten's poems have been translated into English and published in journals like burning deck. In 2010 she collaborated with visual artist Kerstin Cmelka in a book called I, Coleoptile containing original English poetry and film stills, published by Broken Dimanche Press. The book Lather in Heaven, published by the same editor in 2016, assembles her work in English up to date, as well as some selected translations from the German.
In 2016, Jikiketsugaki. Tsurezuregusa, was published by the Peter Engstler Verlag. It contains a selection of Cotten's poems and prose, inspired by Japan, Japanese literature, and the semiotics of the Japanese language. Fast Dumm, Essays von on the road is a reflecting book about visiting the United States, including poems, essays, photographies and her own translations of poems of other poets, like Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, Katia Sophia Ditzler. The book was published by Starfruit Publications in 2017.
Cotten lives in Vienna and in Berlin. She relinquished US citizenship in 2005.

Publications