Mircea Cărtărescu was born in Bucharest in 1956. He is the author of the novel Nostalgia (1993), which was followed by Travesti (1994) and the Blinding trilogy: The Left Wing, The Body and The Right Wing. In 2015 he published the novel Solenoid, his strongest work to date, which earned him the Dublin Literary Award and the L.A. Times Book Prize. His latest novel, Theodoros (2022) has been acclaimed by the critics and well received by readers. Cărtărescu has received numerous literary awards throughout his career, including the 2018 Formentor de las Letras Award, the FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages in 2022 and, in 2024, the International Mondello Prize. He currently lives in Bucharest.