Mircea Cărtărescu
The Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu (born in 1956), who the German magazine Spiegel called „Proust in a slab building“, studied Philology and did his PhD on Romanian Postmodernism. Initially, he worked as a secondary school teacher and then he became a lecturer for Romanian Language and Literature at the University of Bucharest.
He started writing in 1978 and was awarded the price of the Romanian Writers‘ Union for his collection of poems Headlights, Shop Windows, Photographs in 1980. Since 1999, he is also active as a literary critic and contributes significantly to the debate on the process of renewal of Romanian literature. His novel The Left Wing was published in German in 2007. It is the first part of a trilogy called Orbitor in the original. A translation of his collection of short stories Why We Love Women, a Romanian Bestseller from 2005, was published by Suhrkamp in 2008. In 2009, the publisher first published his early prose entitled Nostalgia, a retrospective of Bucharest in the 60s and 70s. The text is very different from German Realism in Literature and can be compared with the classics of Fantasy Literature. The second part of the Orbitor trilogy, The Body, was published in German language in 2011. For this novel, Cărtărescu was awarded the International Prize for Literature of the House of Cultures of the World. In 2013 he received the Spycher Literature Price Leuk together with Michael Roes.
Guest Professorship 2009/10
Books
