Famous Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu won the Premio Gregor von Rezzori for best foreign fiction work translated in Italy at this year’s edition of the Festival degli Scrittori organized in Florence between June 6 and June 8. The Romanian got the award for the second volume of the Orbitor (Blinding) trilogy.

The other four finalists were Dany Laferrière, Yiyun Li, Dinaw Mengestu, and Lorrie Moore. Last year’s winner was Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin for his book Day of the Oprichnik.

Mircea Cartarescu is a poet, novelist, musician and journalist born in Bucharest is 1956. A member of the Romanian Writers’ Union, the Romanian PEN and the European Cultural Parliament, Cartarescu is one of Romania’s best-known contemporary writers. He has won many important prizes, both in Romania and internationally, such as the 2012 Berlin Prize for Literature, the 2013 Spycher-Leuk in Switzerland, and the 2015 Austrian State Prize for European Literature.

A lot of Mircea Cartarescu’s work is available in English, French, Spanish or German and he can be read overall in more than a 20 languages. Read more here.

The Premio Gregor von Rezzori – Citta di Firenze was founded in 2007 in the honor of the Central European novelist. Initially held in the monastery of Vallombrosa, it moved to Florence in 2010 and expanded to become a literary festival including readings, interviews, and theatrical events.

Its previous winners were French author Maylis de Kerangal (2014), Colombian Juan Gabriel Vásquez (2013), Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas (2012), Bosnian-born Aleksandar Hemon (2011), Georgian Percival Everett (2010), Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri (2009), Spanish Arturo Pérez-Reverte (2008), and Libyan writer Hisham Matar (2007).

Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com

(Photo source: Mircea Cartarescu on Facebook)