Dan Lungu

Dan Lungu, born 15 September 1969, is a Romanian novelist, short-story writer, poet and playwright, as well as a literary theorist and sociologist. He has received critical acclaim for his short-story collection Cheta la flegmă (“Quest for Phlegm”) and his novels Raiul găinilor (“Chicken Paradise”) and Sînt o babă comunistă! (“I’m a Communist Biddy!”). He is also regarded as one of the most successful authors to have emerged in post-1990 Romanian literature. Lungu’s literary universe consists primarily of “microsocial” portrayals of life under the communist regime and during the subsequent transition period. His work combines elements of Neorealism with Postmodernism. He is often associated with a group of authors who signed their first major publishing contracts with Polirom, and he is also regarded as a distinctive literary voice from his adopted city of Iași. Dan Lungu is a lecturer at the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Iași and a former editor-in-chief of the newspaper Timpul. He is also the author and co-author of essays and sociological studies on everyday life under communist rule—academic interests that closely overlap with the themes of his fiction. His main areas of historical research include women’s experiences under totalitarian rule, the relationship between official propaganda and the actual lives of working-class people, and the development of cultural attitudes in relation to communist censorship.