(Romania, 1956) Mircea Cărtărescu is Romania’s foremost fiction writer. A major poetic work of his, published in 1990, was The Levant. His first book of fiction was the short story collection Nostalgia (1993), which opens with “The Roulette Player”. This was followed by Travesti (1994), a tortuous and brilliant novel which won him the ASPRO Prize, and the Blinding project (1996-2007), originally published as a trilogy of novels but available in English in a single volume. In 2015 he published the novel Solenoid, considered to be his finest work to date. In 2018 he won the Formentor Prize for Literature, and some think that he may be the first Romanian-language writer to win the Nobel Prize. He is married to the Romanian writer Ioana Nicolaie.