The writer Mircea Cărtărescu won the Dublin Literary Award 2024, worth 100,000 euros, with the novel “Solenoid”.
Mircea Cărtărescu received a new Personal Archive award
“Today I received The Dublin Literary Award for the novel Solenoid. I am grateful to everyone who contributed to this decision”the writer announces.
“With passages of extreme beauty, extremely inventive in places and loaded with philosophical and lyrical accents, Solenoid is the work of an important European writer, relatively unknown to the English public“, was the point of view of the jury that awarded the distinction to Cărtărescu.
The jury members also appreciated the translation from Romanian to English by Sean Cotter, which “captured the lyrical precision of the original (in Romanian), which allowed Cărtărescu's novel to become accessible to a whole new audience of readers”.
A year ago, Mircea Cărtărescu's “Solenoid” was declared the fiction book of the year in the United States by the Los Angeles Times. The literary awards given by the influential newspaper are some of the most prestigious in America.
“Mircea Cărtărescu's masterpiece, Solenoid, is the kind of amazing literary text, whose countless qualities emerge from any fragment, chosen at random. Anchored in the communist environment of Bucharest in the 1970s and early 1980s, the narrator of this anti-novel is a teacher at a certain school who, through myth, fairy tale, dream, hallucination and realistic story, shortens his childhood and youth, his workplace and colleagues and, well, the whole universe.
A literary work of such density (and size) is a serious challenge for any translator, but Sean Cotter lives up to the original'“, the American jury motivated its decision, on this occasion.
Mircea Cărtărescu will receive 75,000 euros, and 25,000 euros will go to Seán Cotter, who translated the novel “Solenoid” into English.
