Filip Florian: Magic and spells
– Romania
Born in Bucharest in 1968, Filip Florian is a prose writer. In the 1990s, he was a journalist and a foreign correspondent of Radio Free Europe and Deutsche Welle. He became famous when he was thirty-seven years old and published his novel titled Degete mici (Little Fingers), which depicts the irrational climate in Romania of the 1990s. The book was subsequently translated and sold in bookstores in Hungary, Poland, Germany, USA, Slovenia, Slovakia, Italy, Spain and Bulgaria. His next novel titled Băiuţeii (The Baiut Alley Lads) was co-authored with his brother Mateo and ironically and nostalgically describes their childhood in one of Bucharest’s suburbs. In the widely acclaimed novel Zilele regelui (The Days of the King), he takes readers back to the 19th century when Karl of the Hohenzollern dynasty became the king of the unified Wallachia and Moldavia. His latest novel titled Toate bufniţele (All the Owls) uses memories to confront the reality of the communist era with the innocence of a child’s view of the world. “Whenever you get immersed in a book, it’s as if you were watching a magician’s performance. Literature is basically all about magic and spells,” he says.