Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu was recently nominated for the European Literature Prize in the Netherlands - Europese Literatuurprijs, for his book 'Orbitor II. The body', which was translated into Dutch. The list of nominees includes 19 other titles, proposed by 13 important bookstores in the Netherlands.

The short list of five authors will be announced in May this year, and the awards will be given in September. The winning authors will get a prize of EUR 10,000 and the translator – who in Cartarescu's case is Jan Willem Bos – will get EUR 2,500.

The European Literature Prize, in its third year and awarded by the Dutch Foundation for Literature, went to Julian Barnes last year for his book. This year, Cartarescu shares a spot on the nomination list with authors such as Martin Amis, Emmanuel Carrère, Julia Franck and Ian McEwan.

Cartarescu's book, translated in Dutch as De trofee, is on sale online at the Athenaeum online shop here. 

Mircea Cartarescu, a poet, essayist, literary critic and publicist, is currently lecturer doctor at the Letters Faculty within the University of Bucharest. He was born in 1956 in Bucharest, Romania. He studied foreign languages and literature at the University of Bucharest and published several volumes of poetry between 1978 and 1985.

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. His works have received numerous national and international awards.

editor@romania-insider.com

(photo source: Athenaeum.nl)