Irina Petraș (born 27 November 1947) is a Romanian writer, literary critic, essayist, translator and editor.

Drawing on suggestions from well-known works on death by Philippe Ariès, Georges Bataille, Edgar Morin, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean Ziegler, Louis Vincent Thomas, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Jean Baudrillard, etc., but also by Emil Cioran, Ion Biberi and Mircea Eliade, Petraș's essays approach the problem of finitude from an innovative and unprejudiced perspective.

She selects and comments freely upon statements concerning the state of deadness, emphasizing various facets of key ideas, almost turning them into leitmotifs: death is a process, not a one-off event; intravital death is worth all the manifestations of life and it alone gives them meaning and importance; a reform of death would restore the dignity of man, who is now lost under the pressure of deceptive dogmas; the mortal condition, as the supreme sign of humanness, can become a force; "the immortal" – either "the new man" of totalitarian systems or the serene and irresponsible "consumer" of post-industrial society – endangers not only the quality of life, but the very existence of humankind.

The second section, Sexual focus and poetry (Gender Analyses), draws on examples from both Romanian and foreign language poetry to support the idea that the gender of nouns organizes the written space, contributes specific nuances to the poetic perspective and deepens the particular manner in which each language represents the world.

Petraș has also translated extensively from English and French into Romanian (Henry James, Marcel Moreau, Jacques De Decker, Jean-Luc Outers, Michel Haar, G. K. Chesterton, D. H. Lawrence, Guy de Maupassant, Anatole France, Mac Linscott Ricketts, Philip Roth, Michel Lambert, Philippe Jones etc.)