Norman Manea

Born to Jewish parents in the Burdujeni [ro] neighbourhood of Suceava (Bukovina, Romania), Manea was deported as a child, in 1941, by the Romanian fascist authorities, allied with Nazi Germany, to a concentration camp in Transnistria, together with his family.

In 1966, his literary debut took place in Povestea Vorbii (The Story of Speech), an avant-garde and influential magazine that appeared in the early years of cultural liberalization in communist Romania and was suppressed after six issues.

At the same time that sustained efforts were made by the cultural authorities to suppress his work, it had the support and praise of the country's most important literary critics.

Over the past two decades, he has been proposed as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature by literary and academic personalities and institutions in the United States, Sweden, Romania, Italy and France.

Important contemporary writers expressed admiration of the author's literary work and his moral stand before and after the collapse of communism: the Nobel laureates Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Octavio Paz, Orhan Pamuk, as well as Philip Roth, Claudio Magris, Antonio Tabucchi, E. M. Cioran, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Cynthia Ozick, Louis Begley and others.