Tatiana Țîbuleac

WINNER

Romania-Tatiana Țîbuleac

Biography

Tatiana Țîbuleac was born in 1978 in Chișinău, Republic of Moldova, and has Moldovan and Romanian nationality. She studied at the Faculty of Journalism and Communications of the Moldova State University.  She first came to the attention of a wide public in 1995, as writer of the ‘True Stories’ column in the Flux daily newspaper. In 1999, she joined the team at PRO TV Chișinău as a reporter, editor and news anchor and also worked in Moldova for UNICEF. Since 2008 she has been living in Paris.

She made her debut as a writer in 2014 with a collection of short stories Fabule Moderne – Modern Tales, from Urma Ta Publishing House, Chișinău. In 2017 her first novel appeared: Vara în care mama a avut ochii verzi – The Summer when my Mother had Green Eyes, Cartier Publishing House, was awarded the prize of the Writer´s Union of Moldova, the prize of the Observator Cultural literary magazine in Bucharest and the Observator Lyceum prize at the FILIT festival in Iași. The novel has been translated into French and Spanish. Grădina de sticlă – The Glass Garden is her second novel.

Nominated book : Grădina de sticlă

Summary

Grădina de sticlă is a Bildungsroman about an orphan, live-proven girl. Although the subject implies the risk of melodrama, the author avoids the trap through a stylistic masterpiece. Taken from the orphanage by a Russian woman, Lastochka is forced by her adoptive mother to pick up empty bottles and wash them, in a yard of miracles in the Chișinău of the 80s, where Russian an Romanian language are in a continuous challenge over all sorts of stories of live. The history of Lastochka implies several themes: search of identity, construction of feminity and the maternal theme, along with an intense orchestration of sentiments and resentments of both love and hate. In a gripping way the author creates the day-to-day universe, scene after scene, one touch after the other. The girl-woman-mother recalls her childhood, unreal and miraculous as it was, as well as her adult metamorphosis, torn apart by a tragic maternity. The novel contains an undisputed historical, even political dimension, which touches the themes of Bessarabian-Romanian relationship and the fall of communism. The subtle tension is controlled not only by thematic, but also through challenges both in vocabulary and topics. Elliptic and passionate, Tatiana Țîbuleac´s writing is about the searching of our place in the world.

Romania

Excerpts

Related publications

Various authors

Special publications
2023

Various authors

Anthology
2019