Thrilling news from Dublin: Mircea Cărtărescu has won the Dublin Literary Award, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world! The awarded book is his most recent novel in English translation, Solenoid, translated from the Romanian original by Sean Cotter and published by Texas-based Deep Vellum in 2022. It was considered one of the best books of the year in the United States, being showered with praise by many important publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, and The Financial Times.

Solenoid is the work of a major European writer who is still relatively little known to English-language readers. Sean Cotter’s translation of the novel sets out to change that situation, capturing the lyrical precision of the original, thereby opening up Cărtărescu’s work to an entirely new readership. – said the DLA jury

This is the second major English-language literary prize that the Romanian writer receives, after the LA Times Book Prize for Fiction, which was awarded to him in April 2023 at the end of a high-profile US promotional tour. It should be added that this time, the same as last year in Los Angeles, Solenoid was the only book in translation entered in the race, making its success all the more resounding.

A great victory, therefore, not only for Mircea Cărtărescu himself, whose reputation is thus crowned with one of the most coveted international prizes, but also for Sean Cotter, the best translator of Romanian literature today, and last but not least for Will Evans, the visionary American publisher who has managed to bring literature in translation into focus, and for the entire Deep Vellum team.

Winning the Dublin Literary Award is one of the most significant achievements in my whole literary career, and a great honor for me. It shows an increase in my image as a writer in the English-speaking world after the publication of Solenoid, my breakthrough novel. I am grateful to the jury who chose my book from so many other wonderful ones. – Mircea Cărtărescu

I am honored to be recognized with as great an author as Mircea, from as great a literature as the Romanian. I hold in my heart the community of Romanian translators, all those who translate the world’s smaller literatures, all those who translate. – Sean Cotter

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👁 Details about this year’s edition of the Dublin Literary Award can be found here. And here you can watch a live recording of the ceremony.

👁 Those who understand Romanian can find out more about Mircea Cărtărescu’s presence in Dallas and his 2023 American tour right on the #cevalamijloc blog here and here.