Mircea Cărtărescu

Born in Bucharest in 1956, Cărtărescu came of age under Ceaușescu's regime as part of Romania's Generation '80, a circle of poets who broke with socialist-realist convention to write in a looser, pop-culture-inflected, distinctly postmodern voice, and he later studied and taught Romanian literature at the University of Bucharest.

Nostalgia, his breakthrough linking stories of visionary Bucharest boyhood, was published in 1989 only after censors forced cuts and a change of title, restored to its full form only after Ceaușescu's fall that same year. He spent much of the following decade writing the sprawling autobiographical trilogy Orbitor, deepening the same hallucinatory, myth-drunk vision of the city into something closer to a private cosmology.

Solenoid, his thousand-page 2015 novel of a failed poet turned schoolteacher who discovers a metaphysical labyrinth beneath his house, confirmed his stature as Romania's most internationally admired living writer, and he has been named a perennial Nobel contender ever since.