Mircea Cărtărescu

Mircea Cărtărescu is Romania's most celebrated living writer, widely regarded as one of the great novelists of contemporary European literature and a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Bucharest, Romania, he studied Romanian philology at the University of Bucharest, where he later taught literature for many years. His magnum opus is the Orbitor trilogy (1996–2007), and his major standalone novel Solenoid (2015, translated into English by Sean Cotter in 2022) won the Dublin Literary Award in 2024. Solenoid is an encyclopedic novel narrated by a failed poet who becomes a schoolteacher in Bucharest, filled with hallucinatory visions, autobiographical meditations, and a deeply surrealist exploration of the Communist-era city. Cărtărescu has received the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the Formentor Prize, the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for European Understanding, the Berlin Prize, and many other international awards. He has been widely translated and is considered a major voice in world literature. His other works include the poetry collection Levantul (1990), widely considered a masterpiece of Romanian poetry, and a series of short story collections. He continues to teach and write in Bucharest.