Ioana Pârvulescu: History, the present and history...

– Romania

Born in 1960 in Brașov, Ioana Pârvulescu is a poet and author of prose and essays, literary critic and a historian. After studying philology in Bucharest, she worked as a teacher at a secondary school, an editor in a publishing house and the chief editor of a literary review section of the România literară weekly. She presently teaches modern Romanian literature at Bucharest University. She published her first poetry collection titled Lenevin dîntr-un ochi (Idling One-Eyed) when she was thirty. Her prose and essays often look into the past to the period she considers the most productive for the s piritual growth of modern Romania — the turn of the 20th cen tury when “people believed in the future and progress and that gave their lives meaning.” Her first novel titled Viaţa începe vineri (Life Begins on Friday), a mysterious story of overlapping past and present, won the EU Prize for Literature.