Bogdan Creţu

Biography

Bogdan Crețu is a novelist, literary critic, and Professor of Romanian Literature at „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași, Romania, he was Director of the Institute of Romanian Philology, Romanian Academy, Iasi (2013-2022). He published 8 books of criticism, including Negative Utopia in Romanian Literature (2008) and The Unicorn at the Eastern Worldʼs Gates: D. Cantemirʼs Bestiary—A Comparative Study (2013, Second edition in 2021), for which he was awarded the debut award of the Romanian Writers’ Union and Romanian Academy’s Titu Maiorescu Prize for Literary Criticism. He is also co-author for important works as La Bible dans les littératures du monde, Éditions du Cerf, Paris, 2016; Romanian Literature as World Literature, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018; Theory in the “Post” Era. A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. He published 3 novels: The Horn of the Unicorn (2021, nominated for „Festival du Premier Roman”, Chambéry), Nikita. The Poet as the Soldier (2022, translated into Serbian, Albatros Plus Publishing House, Belgrade, 2024) and Less than Love (2023, The Romanian PEN Award).

Nominated book : Mai puţin decât dragostea

Summary

When Vlad and Maria meet, they discover that their lives have unsuspected connections with each other. Vlad cannot forget the experience of the unhappy love for Sara, back in the last years of Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. The two lovers find out that they are placed on opposite ends of communism: she is the daughter of a former torturer, who tortured Vlad’s father in Stalinist prisons in the 1950s. Is love still possible? They hide in a mountain village, but they are caught, and because Sara is pregnant, her father accepts their relation. But Sara disappears from everyone’s lives, to punish her father and end the evil he committed. In parallel, the story of Maria, the daughter of a poor family, unfolds, with an alcoholic father and a mother who becomes a housekeeper in the house of Sara’s parents after her escape. As she is very attractive and lives in a brutal, post-communist world, Maria is the victim of a series of harassments that culminate in the rape of her husband. Less than Love is a book about how totalitarianism alters everything, from love to family; about compromise, about fear, but it is also a plea for memory, trying to recover relevant sequences of a past that still marks the present.

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