Mircea Cărtărescu

(Bucharest, Romania, 1956)

He has perhaps received more literary awards than any other Romanian writer: practically all of the country’s prizes as well as international prizes, including the 2012 Berlin Prize for Literature, the 2016 Gregor von Rezzori Award, and the 2018 Formentor Prize. Known for his powerful prose and attentive gaze, his work acutely portrays the entropy in contemporary European life and the yearning for empathy at the heart of the human condition. Since 2010, Impedimenta has published in Spanish some of his outstanding works, among them El ruletista (2010), Lulu (2011), Nostalgia (2012; published in English with this title), El Levante (2015; in English, The Levant), El ojo castaño de nuestro amor (2015), and Solenoide (2017: in English, Solenoid). The books El ala izquierda and El cuerpo, have recently been published as the first and second parts of the trilogy Cegador (in English, Blinding). In recent years, his work has been appearing in Catalan as well, with titles like Per què estimem les dones (Lleonard Muntaner, 2016; in English, Why We Love Women), his powerful work Solenoide (Edicions del Periscopi, 2017), and L’ala esquerra (Edicions del Periscopi, 2018), the first part of the Blinding trilogy, as well as the collection of poems Res. Poemes (1988-1992) (Lleonard Muntaner, 2018).