Doina Ruști (, born 15 February 1957) is a Romanian writer and novelist. Some of her novels are: Fantoma din moară 2008, Zogru, 2006, and Lizoanca la 11 ani, 2009. Her best-known novel in the English-speaking world is The Book of Perilous Dishes.

Biography

Ruști was born in Comoșteni, Dolj County. She was brought up in a village in the south of Romania by her parents and teachers, struggling to survive in a communist world.<references group="Dan C. Mihăilescu - Femeie cu omuleț, în vol. Literatura română în postceaușism, II. Prezentul ca dezumanizare, Ed. Polirom, 2006, p. 248" /> Her blood accommodates ancestry ranging from Montenegrin to Jews and especially Danubian Romanians, all with long names ending in -escu, most of them teachers, store keepers, and horse dealers. Her childhood home in Comoșteni preserved the experiences of a Balkan world, collected throughout hundreds of years. Ruști's youth was spent in a house which had saved the traces of a past rich in events, carriages, coffers, and period clothes, crowned by plenty of books and objects which incited her imagination. But this world had brutally come to an end. When she was eleven, her father was murdered under mysterious circumstances, which have not been elucidated even to this day. The insecurity, oppression, absurd rules and chaos installed at the end of communism blended with the fantastic universe of a village governed by ghost tales, hierophanies, and underground forces, and this dramatic and magical setting inspired the novel Fantoma din moară (The Ghost in the Mill). For this novel, she was awarded the Prize of the Writers' Union of Romania.

Work

A representative contemporary writer, Ruști has a wide variety of topics covered in her novels with a systematic construction. Some of her books were translated into international languages. Her novel Lizoanca la 11 ani, 2009, 2017 was awarded the Ion Creangă Prize of the Romanian Academy. It was remarked as "one of the most powerful contemporary Romanian novels", from the point of view of its themes and typology construction (according to Paul Cernat, Gelu Ionescu, în vol. Târziu de departe, Ed Cartea Românească, 2012, pp. 112 si urm. Gelu Ionescu is the exeget of Eugen Ionesco. On its publication, Lizoanca caused debates, as it brought to the public's attention the story of a child almost unanimously accused of the atrocities committed by the accusers. Translated into German, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, and Serbian, the novel had reviews and kindled debates on taboo themes, such as pedophilia, domestic abuse, the issue of children with incompetent parents (Marina Freier and Magyar Nemzet). For that matter, the topic of family decay as an institution is recurrent in all the novels written by Doina Ruști. Her bestseller Manuscrisul fanariot (The Phanariot Manuscript), 2015, 2016, 2017), which novelizes a18th-century's love story, was followed by Mâța Vinerii (The Book of Perilous Dishes, 2017), a tale about sorcerers and magical culinary recipes, translated into English, German, Spanish, and Hungarian. These two books give a perspective on a quite controversial historical period: the 18th Phanariot century. The stodgy style, the poetic overlay and the narrative fluidity were hallmarks of these two books. She is also the author of the novel Omulețul roșu (The Little Red Man, 2004, 2012), which was awarded the prize of the magazine Convorbiri Literare, and the multi-awarded Zogru (2006, 2015), a meta-novel translated into Italian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Spanish. Ruști brings a specific vision into literature, exhibited throughout all strata of her work, but especially from a linguistic point of view. The creativity of expression lends the marker of her writing. She also wrote a number of short stories, published in periodicals and anthologies.

Style

Taking an interest in both the fantastic and realist genres, Doina Ruști succeeds in writing as persuasively about the atrocities of the contemporary world and high ideals. Her novels often feature rapists, murderers, people who are starving, become corrupt or consumed by trivial commitments, reminding us of William Faulkner's characters – writer who has always inspired her. Ruști also brings to life fantastic characters, elves, sprites, ghosts, magical cats and sorcerers, which prompted some critics to compare her work with Marc Chagall, with Mikhail Bulgakov's, Süskind's and Márquez's [15] (according to Dan C. Mihăilescu, Marco Dotti and Neue Zürcher Zeitung ). The diversified themes that are strongly related to the present, as well as the ability of Doina Rusti of switching between registers, place her among the writers of contemporary Romanian literature (according to Nicolae Breban, Norman Manea, Daniel Cristea-Enache ).

Novels

Translated work

Literary prizes

Evenments