Ileana Malancioiu

Ileana Malancioiu was born in 1940 in a village in Arges, about a hundred miles northwest of Bucharest. From her first collection (1967) onward, her poems draw on rural life and folklore, on religious and literary icons, but their true focus has been on the trauma of history. Ten more books of poems appeared in the 1970s and '80s, and in 1992 came the full text of Urcarea Muntelui (Climbing the Mountain) which had been heavily censored by the Ceausescu regime when it was first published in 1985. Malancioiu's writing is valued in Romania as a moral force, and for the combination of formal language with frequently shocking imagery. In 2004 she received the Romanian Writers' Union Prize for Opera Omnia (Complete Poems). She lives in Bucharest.