Romania’s greatest living writer Mircea Cărtărescu has become a writer-in-residence at Columbia University in New York, the American Embassy announced on Wednesday.
The feted 68-year-old author whose books have been translated globally will teach a course called “Postmodernism vs. Tyranny: A Romanian Literary Revolution”, the U.S. Embassy said in a post on social media.
The course will examine the 1980s legendary generation (the jeans generation) in Romanian literature and its relationship to the Beat generation in American poetry and to American postmodernism in fiction.
This year, Mr. Cărtărescu, was named the Harriman Institute’s 2024 Writer in Residence.
Born in Bucharest in the harsh 1950s to a working-class family, he is an award-winning poet, novelist, literary critic, journalist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Bucharest, member of the Romanian Writers’ Union, Romanian PEN and the European Cultural Parliament.
During his long career, Mr. Cărtărescu has published over 40 books and countless articles which have been translated into over 25 languages.
Solenoid was named one of the Best Books of 2022 by the New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, The Financial Times, and Words Without Borders.
It won this year’s Dublin Literary Award and judges described it as ‘wildly inventive with passages of great beauty.’
Set in late 1970s and early 1980s communist Bucharest, the novel begins with the diaristic reflections of a schoolteacher and expands into an existential, surrealist account of the narrator’s journey through different dimensions, the Guardian reported.
Mr. Cărtărescu’s parents were typical of their generation: peasants brought to the capital in the post-war period to work in Communist factories.
“Even though they were indoctrinated with the official Communist ideology, they remained good people with strong moral values,” he said.
He started to write fiction during the ’80s, a time of great hardship in Romania when food and heating were rationed and Nicolae Ceausescu’s growing paranoia meant people feared his Securitate secret police were everywhere.
He published Nostalgia, a collection of long and short stories in 1989 before the revolution when Ceausescu was toppled and executed and it remains one of his popular books. He then shifted to prose, penning The Blinding Trilogy (over 1500 pages long), Solenoid, and Theodoros, the fruit of “a life of intense writing. ”
Mircea Cărtărescu will teach the four-week course “Postmodernism vs. Tyranny: A Romanian Literary Revolution” (September 19-October 10), the institute said.
Mircea Cărtărescu wins the prestigious Dublin Literary Award
