Ioana Pârvulescu - Life Begins on Friday

In the end, Life Begins on Friday is a book that can be read in various different ways (as a detective novel, as a fantastic novel about time travel, or as a historical novel), but the reader will gain enormously if he or she forgets about such categories and views it quite simply as a living world, full of poetry and truth, the same as all the books that mean something in literature.

Ioana Pârvulescu was born in Braşov, Romania. She attended the Faculty of Letters in Bucharest and after graduation, became a teacher.Her real literary life began after the Revolution of ’89. In 1993 she became an editor at Romania literară , a literary magazine where she published a weekly column for 18 years. She was also an editor at Humanitas publishing house for 10 years. She is currently a Professor at the Bucharest Faculty of Letters where she teaches modern Romanian litterature. Pârvulescu has translated extensively from French and German (Maurice Nadeau, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Angelus Silesius, Rilke etc.) and has authored ten books, among them Return to the Inter-war Bucharest (imaginative non-fiction, 2003), I n the Thick of the Nineteenth Century (2005) and Life Begins on Friday (2009), which won her the EU Prize for Literature and has been translated into a number of European languages. Her most recent novel is The Future Begins on Monday (2012).

Alistair Ian Blyth is one of the most active translators working from Romanian to English today. A native of Sunderland, England, Blyth attended the universities of Cambridge and Durham, and has resided for many years in Bucharest. His many translations from Romanian include: Little Fingers by Filip Florian; Our Circus Presents by Lucian Dan Teodorovici; Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality by Max Blecher; Coming from an Off-Key Time by Bogdan Suceavă and most recently, The Bulgarian Truck by Dumitru Tsepeneag, for Dalkey Archive Press.