Mircea Cartarescu

Born 1956 in Bucharest.

Mircea Cartarescu is an associate professor at the University of Bucharest, a writer, an essayist, a journalist and a literary critic. He studied and completed his doctoral thesis at the Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest.

Cartarescu has been publishing poems and prose since 1978. In 2008, »Warum wir die Frauen lieben« (Why We Love Women) was released by the Suhrkamp publishing house, the German translation of a collection of short stories, a best seller in Romania in 2004 (»De ce iubim femeile«, Humanitas). In 2007, his novel »Die Wissenden« (The Ones Who Know) was published in German by the Zsolnay publishing house. The novel is the first part of a trilogy, originally entitled »Orbitor«.

Other publications include » Nostalgia«, five long short stories (1989); »The Levant«, an epic poem (1990); »The Romanian Postmodernism«, a critical essay (1999) and »Travesti«, a novel (1993).

Cartarescu is one of Romania’s leading contemporary writers. His work has been translated into 15 languages and awarded international prizes.

He is a member of the Romanian Writers’ Union and the European Cultural Parliament. Cartarescu was a fellow of the International Writing Program (Iowa City, 1990), the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio/Italy, 1997), the Artists-in-Residence program of the DAAD (Berlin, 2001) and Akademie Schloss Solitude (2006/2007). He taught literature in Amsterdam (1994/1995) and Vienna (2004/2005).