23 Facts About Dan Lungu

Dan Lungu completed his education in Iasi, at the local university's Sociology Department, while pursuing interests in track and field, as well as Go.

Dan Lungu developed a passion for writing from a young age, but debuted in literature only in the early 1990s.

The first volume bearing Dan Lungu's signature saw print with Editura Junimea in 1996: a poetry collection, it carried the title Muchii.

Dan Lungu's stories, including Buldozeristul, winner of the Editura Nemira prize for 1997, saw print in various venues during the late 1990s.

Dan Lungu debuted as a dramatist, his work being included in two anthologies of young Romanian theater.

In 2003, Dan Lungu published three books of essays on literary theory and microsociology, titled respectively Povestirile vietii.

Dan Lungu visited France in 2005, invited by the Belles Etrangeres cultural exchange program, and, in 2007, returned as a Writer-in-Residence at the Villa Mont Noir, Marguerite Yourcenar's birthplace.

Dan Lungu was twice nominated for the European Commission's Jean Monnet Award for Literature in 2008.

Dan Lungu subsequently left his prior position as director of the Museum of Romanian Literature.

Ever since his debut in prose, Dan Lungu has drawn attention as a leading figure among a generational wave of prose writers, most of whom published their work with Polirom.

Dan Lungu believes him to be of the same rank as Cezar Paul-Badescu, Victoria Comnea, Radu Pavel Gheo, Ana Maria Sandu, Cecilia Stefanescu and Lucian Dan Teodorovici, but below the "very good" category of Petre Barbu, T O Bobe, Filip Florian, Florin Lazarescu, Sorin Stoica and Bogdan Suceava.

Cernat, who noted that Dan Lungu has a preference for publishing his work with Iasi-based venues, deduced "the strategy of asserting a personal project with several levels, which assigns a certain place to a 'Moldavian' identity".

Reportedly, Dan Lungu refused several offers to move into Bucharest, Romania's capital, to which he prefers his adoptive Iasi.

Dan Lungu's main influences include foreign authors Peter Handke, Michel Houellebecq and Elfriede Jelinek, while his imagery has drawn comparisons with the films of Yugoslavian-born director Emir Kusturica.

Dan Lungu has become one of the Romanian authors best known outside Romania, and, according to literary critic Marius Chivu, one in the rare position of being recommended to a local public with quotes from foreign critics.

Dan Lungu's prose is placed in connection to the debates surrounding the Postmodern nature of the Optzecisti, writers who debuted a decade before Lungu, but whose contribution is seen as influential on the young literary scene.

Dan Lungu is a successor to the Neorealist group among the Optzecisti, and seen by Moldovan literary critic Iulian Ciocan as less indebted to "the Postmodern paradigm".

Dan Lungu acknowledges that his main literary works tend to center each on a particular narrative technique, but recounts that the substance for this technique is only apparent to himself a posteriori.

The thesis advanced by Dan Lungu is that Romania's pre-communist authoritarian traditions accompanied Westernization, and therefore failed to rally the society around the notion of legality.

Vasile quotes the book for its conclusions about the impact of agitprop, socialist realism and censorship on Romanian literature and education, including a corroboration of the censors' own dissatisfaction with their activity, or the link Dan Lungu establishes between the spread of atheism and the communist version of science education.

Dan Lungu however recounted having written it with "pleasure, a masochistic pleasure".

Dan Lungu takes the voice of a little girl shocked by the brutality of family life and the promiscuity of life in a block apartment.

Whoever carefully reads Dan Lungu gets a free lesson in the manipulation techniques to which all those who wish to have us convinced of the truth in non-literary fiction will expose us without warning and at times successfully.