Mircea Cartarescu

Mircea Cărtărescu, born in Bucharest in 1956, is a Romanian writer, poet and literary critic. After studying philology, he first taught at a school and later worked as a lecturer in Romanian language and literature at the University of Bucharest. He began publishing poetry and prose in 1978, and his work has been translated into numerous languages. His best-known books include Nostalgia (1997), the Orbitor trilogy (2007–2014), Solenoid (2019), Melancolia (2022) and Theodoros (2024). Cărtărescu has received, among other distinctions, the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (both 2015), the Thomas Mann Prize and the Formentor Prize (both 2018), the FIL Prize in Romance Languages (2022) and the International Dublin Literary Award (2024).