Norman Manea

Norman Manea (born July 19, 1936) is a Romanian writer and author of short fiction, novels, and essays about the Holocaust, daily life in a communist state, and exile. He is a Francis Flournoy Professor of European Culture and writer in residence at Bard College. He currently lives in the United States.

Norman Manea was born in Suceava, Bukovina, Romania, in 1936. As a child he was deported to a Transnistrian concentration camp in the Ukraine with his family and the entire Jewish population of the region. He returned to Romania with surviving members of his family in 1945. Manea graduated with high honor the "Stephen the Great" high school in his home town, then he studied engineering at the Construction Institute in Bucharest and graduated with master’s degree in hydro-technique in 1959, working afterwards in planning, fieldwork and research.

He published his first work of fiction in 1966, in the avant-garde literary magazine "Povestea Vorbii" (The Story of the Word), an avant-garde and influential magazine that appeared in the early years of cultural “liberalization” in communist Romania and was suppressed after six issues. He became a freelance writer in 1974. Until he was forced into exile (1986) he published in Romania ten volumes of short fiction, essays and novels, among them "Anii de ucenicie ai lui August Prostul" (1979; Engl: The Years of Apprenticeship of Augustus the Fool), "Octombrie, ora opt" (1981; Engl: October, Eight O'Clock, 1992) and "Plicul negru" (1986; Engl: The Black Envelope, 1995).

Critics have compared his complex narrative strategies to Kafka, Joyce and Musil. In 1979 he was awarded the Literature Prize of the Bucharest Writers’ Association. Two years later, in an interview with the literary magazine "Familia", he pleaded for a democratic opening up of the country as well for greater integrity of writers, sparking off a hostile official media campaign with anti-Semitic undertones. In 1984 he was awarded the Literature Prize of the Romanian Writers’ Union but was then denied the award under pressure from the state's cultural authorities. His work was an irritant to the authorities because of the implied and overt social-political criticism and he faced a lot of trouble with the censors and the official press. At the same time that sustained efforts were made by the cultural authorities to suppress his work, it had the support and praise of the country’s most important literary critics. "Plicul negru", the last novel published in Romania before he decided to leave the country, provoked a sharp and prolonged conflict with the State's censors, which the author went on to describe in his essay "The Censor's Report" in the volume "Despre clovni: dictatorul si artistul" (1997; Engl: On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist, 1992).

Even before any of his books came out abroad, in 1983 Heinrich Böll urged for his work to be published in the West. The first publication in Germany, "Roboterbiographie und andere Erzählungen" (Engl: Robot-Biography and Other Stories) appeared in 1987, when Manea was a guest of the DAAD. He then went on to the USA on a Fulbright scholarship and has been living there ever since. After the collapse of the Ceausescu dictatorship, several of his old and new books started to be published in Romania. The publication in the Romanian democratic press of his essays Happy Guilt, appeared in the US (The New Republic, August 1991) on Mircea Eliade and his former fascist connection provoked a big scandal in the entire Romanian press and hysteria in the nationalistic newspapers. Echoes of this scandal can be still be found in some articles of the current Romanian cultural press. Meantime, in the United States and in the European countries, Norman Manea’s writing was received with great acclaim. Over the past two decades he has been proposed as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature by literary and academic personalities and institutions in the United States, Sweden, Romania, Italy and France. Important contemporary writers expressed admiration towards the author’s literary work and his moral stand before after the collapse of communism: the Nobel laureates Heinrich Boll, Gunther Grass, Octavio Paz, Orhan Pamuk, as well as Philip Roth, Claudio Magris, Antonio Tabucchi, E. M. Cioran, Antonio Munoz Molina, Cynthia Ozick, Louis Begley and others.

In his memoir "Întoarcerea huliganului" (2003; Engl: The Hooligan's Return, 2003), for which he was awarded the French Prix Medicis for Foreign Literature 2006, Manea chronicled his visit to his native country in the late nineties, his experience of exile and life under two totalitarian systems, fascist and communist. He has received many honours, among them the MacArthur Fellows Award, The Guggenheim Grant, the Literary Lion Medal of the New York National Library, the National Jewish Book Award and the International Nonino Prize for Literature. In 2005 Manea was Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Elected member of the Berlin Academy of Art (Germany) 2007 – Finalist, The Latinity Prize by the Association of Latin Countries 2007 – Awarded the Order of Cultural Merit (in rank of Commander) by the President of Romania (Romania) 2008 – Honorary Degree in Literature, University of Bucharest (Romania) 2008. His work has been translated into 15 languages. Norman Manea is a member of the American PEN Center. He teaches European Literature and is Writer in Residence at Bard College, north of New York City. He lives with his wife in Manhattan.

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Monica Lovinescu

Monica Lovinescu (November 19, 1923, Bucharest – April 20, 2008, Paris) was a Romanian essayist, short story writer, literary critic, translator, and journalist, noted for her activities as an opponent of the Romanian Communist regime.


Daughter of literary figure Eugen Lovinescu, Monica was born in Bucharest. Having graduated from the University of Bucharest, she obtained in 1947 a scholarship from the French Government. Only a few months later, after Romania was declared a Popular Republic, Monica Lovinescu asked for political asylum and settled in Paris. A close friend of Ionesco, Cioran and Mircea Eliade who come alive in her memoirs published in Bucharest. Throughout her life Lovinescu was active as a journalist and broadcaster, waging an unequal war against the Communist oppression in Romania and elsewhere.

From 1951 to 1975, she is the Romanian correspondent of the French Overseas broadcasting in Romanian language on Literature and Music. From 1967 she presents at Radio Free Europe the cycle “Teze şi antiteze la Paris” and the “Actualitatea culturală românească”, which enjoy a huge audience in Romania. These attract the attention of Romania’s secret services as a result of which Monica Lovinescu becomes the target of the Securitate operatives in Paris, is roughed up on the doorstep of her flat and receives threats and hate calls. This leaves Monica Lovinescu shaken but even more determined in waging her crusade with the pen and the microphone against the indomitable Ceauşescu, for a long time the “darling of the West”.


She published several works under the pseudonyms Monique Saint-Come and Claude Pascal, and was married to the literary critic Virgil Ierunca. She published extensively on the subject of communism in her country, as well as works on Romanian literature. Her articles were frequently featured in prestigious magazines such as Kontinent, Les Cahiers de l'Est, and L'Alternative. She contributed the Romanian chapter of the collection of essays titled Histoire des spectacles (published by Éditions Gallimard). In recognition of her life-long contribution to the Romanian political and Cultural Life, Monica Lovinescu was honored by the Romanian Presidency with the Order of the Grand Cross of Romania.