Romanian author, essayist and poet Mircea Cártárescu, the winner of the FIL Literature Prize in Romance Languages for 2022, enjoyed an encounter with “A Thousand Young People” at the International Book Fair, in which he talked about his poor upbringing and love of books from an early age.
Cártárescu’s parents moved from the countryside to the city when he was a small child, his father working in a tram factory and his mother as a weaver. He told his audience that he wrote his first novel at the age of nine: nine pages long with two characters, Jack and Jimmy, who traveled around the world. The writer said he bought his first books with the lunch money his mother gave him to take to school. He said he would often read for up to eight or nine hours a day, much to the concern of his parents who would have preferred him to go outside and play soccer.
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