Romania has nominated four writers for the Nobel prizes this year. The Writers' Union in Romania proposed Nicolae Breban, Mircea Cartarescu, Norman Manea and Varujan Vosganian (in picture) for the famous awards.

The latter of the four was also an Economy Minister, and graduated the Academy of Economic Studies.

Vosganian, 55, was Romania's Economy Minister between April 2007 and December 2008, and December 2012 and October 2013. He is also a member of the Writers' Union board, which was in charge of nominations for the Nobel prizes.

The Romanian Writers' union is one of the institutions which receive invitations from the Swedish Academy to nominate writers for the Nobel prizes. The main criteria for nominations this year were “the value of the writers and the translation of their works in foreign languages.”

The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded 106 times to 110 Nobel Laureates between 1901 and 2013. Last year's winner was Alice Munro, "master of the contemporary short story".

Mircea Cartarescu and Norman Manea are among the best known Romanian writers abroad, whose works have been translated to foreign languages. They have also received numerous international awards. Manea is also the most translated Romanian author.

Manea has become one of the most important contemporary Eastern European writers. His work, translated into 20 languages, has received high literary international prizes. His volume “Intoarcerea Huliganului’ – ‘The Hooligan’s Return’, a memoir volume published in 2003, was considered by The New Yorker Magazine ‘an extraordinary book’. Manea is currently living in the US.

Mircea Cartarescu is one of the best known contemporary Romanian authors. He is a poet, novelist and essayist, member of the Romanian Writers’ Union and of the European Cultural Parliament. His works have been translated into more than 14 languages, bringing him international fame.

Nostalgia, published in 1989, is by far the most famous of Cartarescu’s works. His most important works are: Headlights, Shop Windows, Photographs – poems (1980), Love Poems (1982), Everything (1984), Nostalgia (1989), The Levant (1990), Love (1994), Dazzling Light, (1996), The Romanian Postmodernism (1999), The Encyclopedia of Dragons (2002). In 2004, he published a new book entitled Why We Love Women, which is a set of twenty short stories about the eternal war between sexes.

Varujan Vosganian writes poems and fiction. Some of his latest books include Jesus with 1,000 arms – poems, from 2004, and The Book of Whispers, from 2009.

Nicolae Breban, 79, is a Romanian novelist and essayist. He has been writing since the 60s, and some of his latest books include The Only Path from 2011, and Jiquidi, from 2007. Some of his novels were translated to French, Italian, English, Russian, Swedish, among others.

In 1895, Alfred Nobel gave the largest share of his fortune to a series of prizes, the Nobel Prizes, which are awarded in certain domains every year. For literature, Nobel himself wrote that it was dedicated to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. More about the Nobel prize in literature, here.

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