Octavian Soviany (Romania)

Born in 1954 in Braşov, OCTAVIAN SOVIANY debuted in 1983 with the poetry collection The Apprenticeship of the Old Alchemist. He has published volumes of poetry (such as The Book of Benedict, Letters from Arcadia, Other Old-Fashioned Poems, Dilecta, Powder, Dust and Revolution, Magellan’s Heel, Adda, Life After Life, Love Poems, Night in the Archipelago, Sixty-six, The Other Way to Look at the World), novels (The Archives of Monte Negro, The Life of Kostas Venetis, The Death of Siegfried, The Ghost, The House on Siren Street, The Little Saturnian, Embarkation to Cythera, The Drunk Ship, The Head of a Faun, A Shepherdess from the Ardennes), theater, criticism and translations of universal poetry and prose (Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Apollinaire, Dumas, Saint-Exupery). He translated several of Jacques Ellul’s fundamental books (The Metamorphosis of the Bourgeois, The Undermining of Christianity, The Betrayal of the West, Man and Money, The Kingdom of Nonsense, The Technical System).

He has won several literary awards: the Bucharest Writers’ Association Award (1994, 2004, 2010). The Prose Award awarded by Radio Romania Cultural (2012), the Poetry Award of the Observator Cultural magazine (2013), the Poetry Book of the Year Award (2014), the National Prose Award awarded by Ziarul de Iași, the Lyceum Award of the Observator Cultural magazine (2016), the Cezar Ivănescu Award awarded by the League of Albanians in Romania. He has been translated into Spain, Bulgaria and Slovenia. He has appeared in several anthologies of Romanian poetry and prose published in France, Sweden, Germany, Portugal.