Norman Manea in conversation with Paul Bailey

Romanian Cultural Institute
1 Belgrave Square SW1X 8PH
30 March 2011, 7PM


The Royal Society of Literature in association with The Romanian Cultural Institute present Norman Manea in conversation with Paul Bailey, an event chaired by Elaine Feinstein.

Born in Romania in 1936, Norman Manea was deported with his family in 1941 to a concentration camp in the Ukraine. He returned to Romania after the Second World War, and remained there until Ceausescu’s dictatorship forced him to leave the country in 1986. He lives in the United States and is currently Francis Flournoy Professor in European Studies and Culture and Writer in Residence at Bard College.

Manea’s fiction and essays, translated into more than twenty languages, have been garlanded with prizes. The Hooligan’s Return (2003), a novelistic memoir encompassing eighty years from the Thirties through the war, Communism and post Communism, won the Prix Médicis Etranger. Over the past two decades Norman Manea has been proposed as a candidate for the Nobel Prize of Literature by literary personalities, academics and academic institutions, in the United States, Sweden, Romania, Italy and France.

Manea's novels and stories present inner views from the Romania of terror, from the bankruptcy of Eastern-European socialism and from the sell out of political utopias. Nobody else besides Norman Manea has succeeded in describing the climate of a dictatorship in such a realistic and oppressive way. Günter Grass, Nobel Laureate

With novelist and broadcaster Paul Bailey, Manea discusses his life and work, his ‘exile before and after exile’, and his political and cultural preoccupations.

Paul Bailey (b.1937) was awarded the E. M. Forster Award in 1974 and the George Orwell Prize in 1978. His novels include At The Jerusalem (1967), which won a Somerset Maugham Award and an Arts Council Writers' Award; Peter Smart's Confessions (1977) and Gabriel's Lament (1986), both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction; and Sugar Cane (1993). Kitty and Virgil (1998) is the story of the relationship between an English woman and an exiled Romanian poet.

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