Romanian-born writer Norman Manea became fellow of the Royal Society of Literature earlier this week in London, the first Romanian to become a honorary member of the 200-year old society. Manea shares the fellowship status in the Royal Society with writers such as Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Alice Munro, John Banville, Umberto Eco, Kazuo Ishiguro and George Steiner.

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’. Read The New Yorker’s review of the book here. The book received the French Prix Medicis for Foreign Literature in 2006. His latest novel, ‘Vizuina’ (The Lair) was published in Romania in 2010.

Norman Manea was born in Suceava, in the Bucovina region of Romania, in 1936, in a Jewish family. Deported as a child to a concentration camp in Ukraine, he returned to Romania with the surviving members of his family in 1945. He went on to study in Bucharest and worked as a hydraulic engineer. He started to publish in 1966 and left Romania in 1986, which he described in Royal Society discussion in his honor as something of an "absurdest adventure."

At the event Manea paid tribute to other Romania writers, including George Bacovia, and praised some of the "bleak but warm" pictures of Romania in literature as well as the sense of humor. He described how the old Romanian regime's dogmatic approach to the arts discouraged creativity and prompted him to study maths and engineering. Manea said his work as an engineer gave him the opportunity to meet many ordinary Romanians and at one point prisoners, which would later provide him with material for his writing.

Manea went to the US on a Fulbright scholarship and has been living there ever since. He now lives with his wife in Manhattan.

Considered to be one of the most well-known and successful contemporary Romanian writers, Manea has received many awards: 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. His writings depict the Holocaust, the daily life in a totalitarian communist state and his exile, while also focusing the lenses on the inner life of the individual.

We wrote about Norman Manea in our Famous Romanians piece here.

editor@romania-insider.com