We have often come to lower our heads when we “go out into the world”, we’re no longer proud of being Romanian. Our unfortunate image abroad has come to shape and define us. But there are also people who remind us we still have reasons to rejoice in living in Romania. One of these people is Mircea Cartarescu, winner of the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.
The Germanic world seems to have fallen in love with our popular writer, Mircea Cartarescu. After he was awarded the Leipzig Prize for European Harmony on March 11th this year, Cartarescu will be rewarded with the Osterreichischer Staatspreis fur Europaische Literatur, one of the most prestigious prizes in international literature. The value of the prize is 25.000 Euro and it is offered in recognition of the entire literary work of the Romanian writer.
In 1970, Eugen Ionescu was honored with this award. Ever since, no other Romanian writer has received this distinction. Mircea Cartarescu takes his place among other famous laureates like Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Umbero Eco, Italo Calvino, Vaclav Havel, Javier Marias or John Banville.
Born on June 1st 1956 in Bucharest, Mircea Cartarescu attended the Philology Faculty at the University of Bucharest before making his debut as a poet and later as a novelist. Among his most famous writers, we should mention the volume of stories “Nostalgia”, the short novel “Travesti” and the three volume novel “Orbitor”, a referential work in Romanian contemporary work. In Romania, Cartarescu has received prizes from the Romanian Academy, the Professional Writers’ Association, but also from several magazines: Flacara, Tomis or Ziarul de Iasi. Cartarescu has obtained international recognition as well, being awarded the prizes of Leipzig, Frankfurt, Paris, Torino, Goteborg. During the past years, he has been counted among the favorite writers in the “race” for the prestigious Nobel Prize.
The Austrian State Prize for European Literature will be awarded on July 27th 2015 in the opening of the Mozart Festival in Salzburg.