A short life of the author
Mircea Cărtărescu (b. 1 June 1956) was born in Bucharest, Romania. He studied Romanian literature at the University of Bucharest and has taught there since 1991.
Life and Career
Cărtărescu was first known as a poet in the 1980s generation. Nostalgia (1993) — a collection of interlinked novellas set in a phantasmagoric version of Bucharest — established his prose reputation. The Blinding trilogy — Orbitor: Aripa stângă (The Left Wing, 1996), Orbitor: Corpul (The Body, 2002), Orbitor: Aripa dreaptă (The Right Wing, 2007) — is a vast, hallucinatory autobiographical novel set in Communist and post-Communist Bucharest: part memoir, part science fiction, part mystical vision.
Solenoid (2015) — about a failed poet who works as a schoolteacher and discovers that his apartment sits atop a mysterious solenoid — is his masterpiece: over 600 pages of dense, obsessive, visionary prose. It won the 2024 International Booker Prize.
Major Works and Themes
Cărtărescu writes about Bucharest, the body, dreams, and the thin boundary between reality and hallucination. He is the most important living Romanian writer.
Key Works
- Blinding (trilogy, 1996–2007)
- Solenoid (2015)
Collecting Cărtărescu
Romanian originals (Humanitas) are the primary collected form. English translations (Archipelago) bring $15–$30. Cărtărescu continues to publish.