Dan Coman: Neither a poet nor a prose writer
– Romania
Born in 1975 into the family of a priest, Dan Coman grew up in a rectory, played in the cemetery as a child and currently lives in Bistrița in Transylvania where he works as a teacher at a secondary business school. He prefers to write his poetry and prose early in the morning when everyone else is asleep, armed only with coffee, cigarettes, notebook and a black ballpen. He says he is neither a poet nor a prose writer: “My novels are not really prose and my collections don’t include poems. I write books as monolithic structures, they’re made of a single continuous piece.” He published his first poetry collection titled Anul cârtiţei galbene (The Year of the Yellow Mole) when he was twenty-eight years old, winning a number of awards for new poets. He followed up on it with three more poetry books, two anthologies of his own poems and three novels. He claims to have started writing in prose because he suddenly became unable to write poetry. He likes to be tough with his characters, like Lars von Trier.