Norman Manea

Norman Manea (; born July 19, 1936), is a Romanian Jewish writer and author of short fiction, novels, and essays about the Holocaust, daily life in a communist state, and exile. He lives in the United States, where he is a Professor and writer in residence at Bard College.

He left Romania in 1986 with a DAAD-Berlin Grant and in 1988 went to the US with a Fulbright Scholarship at the Catholic University in Washington DC. He won the 2002 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

Manea's most acclaimed book, '' The Hooligan's Return'' (2003), is an original fictionalized memoir, encompassing a period of almost 80 years, from the pre-war period, through the Second World War, the communist and post-communist years to the present.

Manea has been known and praised as an internationally important writer since the early 1990s, and his works have been translated into more than 20 languages. He has received more than 20 awards and honors.

Early years

Born to Jewish parents in the neighborhood 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. He returned to Romania in 1945 with the surviving members of his family and graduated with high honors from the high school (liceu) Ștefan cel Mare in his home town, Suceava. He studied engineering at the Construction Institute in Bucharest and graduated with master's degree in hydro-technique in 1959, working afterwards in planning, fieldwork and research. He has devoted himself to writing since 1974.

Literary career

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. Until he was forced into exile (1986) he published ten volumes of short fiction essays and novels. His work was an irritant to the authorities because of the implied and overt social-political criticism and he faced a lot of trouble with the censors and the official press. 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.

After the collapse of the Ceaușescu dictatorship, several of his books started to be published in Romania. The publication in a Romanian translation of his essay ''Happy Guilt'', which first appeared in ''The New Republic'', led to a nationalist outcry in Romania, which he in turn has analysed in depth in his essay "Blasphemy and Carnival". Echoes of this scandal can still be found in some articles of the current Romanian cultural press.

Meantime, in the United States and in European countries, Manea's writing was received with great acclaim. 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.

Honors

*1979 – Literary Prize of the Bucharest Writers' Association (Romania)
*1984 – Literary Prize of the Romanian Writer's Union (withdrawn by the Communist authorities)
*1987 – DAAD Berliner Künstler Programm Grant (Germany)
*1988 – Fulbright Scholarship, Catholic University, Washington, DC (USA)
*1989–1992 – International Academy for Scholarship and the Arts Fellowship, Bard College (USA)
*1992 – Guggenheim Fellowship (USA)
*1992 – MacArthur Fellows Award (USA)
*1993 – The National Jewish Book Award

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