The Writers Union Awards
The Writers Union in Romania on Wednesday announced its winners for 2015.
Bogdan Matei, 02.06.2016, 13:39
Some of Romania’s well-established writers, loved by the readership and respected by fellow writers are the winners of the 2015 Writers’ Union Awards. According to the Writers’ Union webpage, the most important award, the National Prize for Literature went to novelist Mircea Cartarescu, who turned 60 on the very day he got the award. Cartarescu, currently a professor at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bucharest and a major theorist of postmodernism, a poet and essay writer, is by far been the most en vogue writer both at home and abroad.
Sold out shortly after its publication, his mainstream book ‘Why We Love Women’ has been pirated and the number of the illegal copies sold has even been twice as much as the original book. Cartarescu’s books have been translated into numerous languages, such as English, Italian, French, Spanish, Polish, Swedish, Bulgarian and Hungarian and his name has been most frequently mentioned in debates over a Romanian nomination for the Nobel Prize.
The Writers’ Union Special Prize went to essay-writer Horia-Roman Patapievici for his volume entitled ‘The Dark Side Decides Everything’. A physicist by training, Patapievici is one of the most influential Romanian intellectuals on the so-called ‘market of ideas’. Rigorous and impeccable to his fans, dry and boring to his opponents, the style of his essays is tributary to his stature as a scientist. The values he publicly promotes in the public area, from libertarian economic policies to traditional Christianity — belong to the conservative ideological family and have turned him into the favourite target of left-wing ideologists. A supporter of the former Romanian president Traian Basescu, under whose mandate, he served as president of the Romanian Cultural Institute endorsing some of its questionable decisions, Patapievici has recently withdrawn from the public scene.
The Prose Award for 2015 went to Dan Stanca for a volume entitled, ‘Gethsemane 51’. A heavy-duty editorialist of the former influential rightist daily paper Romania Libera, Stanca has published over 20 novels deploring the errors of the modernity being also suffused with nostalgia for the pre-Communist Romania.
Vasile Dan’s ‘Contact Lens’ book has reaped the highest award for poetry, while Mircea Anghelescu has been designated winner of the Literary History & Criticism section for his volume entitled ‘the Golden Wool”. The Writers’ Union Awards represented one of the increasingly rare moments of consensus inside the Writers’ Union, where the management of prof Nicolae Manolescu, lasting for more tyhan twenty years has been increasingly and more vehemently contested by some of his colleagues.
(Translated by D. Bilt)
