In times of calamity and social distress, it was often the writers who were called to imagine how the world would heal its wounds and begin again. Inspired by the creative examples of the past, we have summoned an extraordinary ensemble of authors and translators and challenged them to picture by way of prose and poetry how life re-emerging from the black silence of the pandemic may look like. We continue our online series LIFE ANEW. WRITERS IMAGINE THE WORLD AFTER THE PANDEMIC, created together with the National Museum of Romanian Literature, with playfully refined and experimentally daring T.O. BOBE, with an English version by Romanian-American translator ANDREEA SCRIDON.
T.O. BOBE was born in Constanța, in 1969. He worked as a literary secretary at The Small Theatre, Bucharest, as a TV writer and editor, and as an advertising copywriter; currently he works a freelance writer. He is the author of Curl (poetry, Univers Publishing House, 1999), Santa's Gift (children's book, Humanitas Publishing House, 2003, 2011, 2017),What I Did In The Summer Holidays (novel, Polirom Publishing House, 2004, 2007, and Humanitas Publishing House, 2011, 2019),The Centrifuge (Polirom Publishing House, 2005),The Contorsionist (stories, Humanitas Publishing House, 2011),The Book of Loose Ends (novel, Humanitas Publishing House, 2019). He contributed with various texts to several collective volumes and excerpts from his works have appeared in a number of anthologies in Romania, Poland, Germany, France, Croatia, and Belgium.The Centrifuge was published in German by Merz&Solitude in 2004; the English version of Curl was released by Wakefield Press in 2019 and shortlisted this year for the first Derek Walcott Prize.