The Most Famous

WRITERS from Romania

This page contains a list of the greatest Romanian Writers. The pantheon dataset contains 7,302 Writers, 56 of which were born in Romania. This makes Romania the birth place of the 22nd most number of Writers behind Egypt, and Iran.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary Romanian Writers of all time. This list of famous Romanian Writers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of Romanian Writers.

1. Eugène Ionesco (1909 - 1994)

With an HPI of 74.53, Eugène Ionesco is the most famous Romanian Writer. His biography has been translated into 75 different languages on wikipedia.

Eugène Ionesco (French: [øʒɛn jɔnɛsko]; born Eugen Ionescu, Romanian: [e.uˈdʒen joˈnesku] ; 26 November 1909 – 28 March 1994) was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French, and was one of the foremost figures of the French avant-garde theatre in the 20th century. Ionesco instigated a revolution in ideas and techniques of drama, beginning with his "anti play", The Bald Soprano which contributed to the beginnings of what is known as the Theatre of the Absurd, which includes a number of plays that, following the ideas of the philosopher Albert Camus, explore concepts of absurdism and surrealism. He was made a member of the Académie française in 1970, and was awarded the 1970 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 1973 Jerusalem Prize.

2. Tristan Tzara (1896 - 1963)

With an HPI of 72.46, Tristan Tzara is the 2nd most famous Romanian Writer. His biography has been translated into 66 different languages.

Tristan Tzara (French: [tʁistɑ̃ dzaʁa]; Romanian: [trisˈtan ˈt͡sara]; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; 28 April [O.S. 16 April] 1896 – 25 December 1963) was a Romanian avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vinea (with whom he also wrote experimental poetry) and painter Marcel Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland. There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented Dada's nihilistic side, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball. After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara, by then one of the "presidents of Dada", joined the staff of Littérature magazine, which marked the first step in the movement's evolution toward Surrealism. He was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split, defending his principles against André Breton and Francis Picabia, and, in Romania, against the eclectic modernism of Vinea and Janco. This personal vision on art defined his Dadaist plays The Gas Heart (1921) and Handkerchief of Clouds (1924). A forerunner of automatist techniques, Tzara eventually aligned himself with Breton's Surrealism, and under its influence wrote his celebrated utopian poem "The Approximate Man". During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his humanist and anti-fascist perspective with a communist vision, joining the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance during World War II, and serving a term in the National Assembly. Having spoken in favor of liberalization in the People's Republic of Hungary just before the Revolution of 1956, he distanced himself from the French Communist Party, of which he was by then a member. In 1960, he was among the intellectuals who protested against French actions in the Algerian War. Tristan Tzara was an influential author and performer, whose contribution is credited with having created a connection from Cubism and Futurism to the Beat Generation, Situationism and various currents in rock music. The friend and collaborator of many modernist figures, he was the lover of dancer Maja Kruscek in his early youth and was later married to Swedish artist and poet Greta Knutson.

3. Paul Celan (1920 - 1970)

With an HPI of 69.51, Paul Celan is the 3rd most famous Romanian Writer. His biography has been translated into 49 different languages.

Paul Celan (; German: [ˈtseːlaːn]), born Paul Antschel, (23 November 1920 – c. 20 April 1970) was a Romanian-born French poet, Holocaust survivor, and literary translator. Due to his many radical poetic and linguistic innovations, Celan regarded as one of the most important figures in German-language literature of the post-World War II era and a poet whose verse has an immortal place in the literary pantheon. His poetry is characterized by a complicated and cryptic style that deviates from poetic conventions.

4. Herta Müller (b. 1953)

With an HPI of 69.10, Herta Müller is the 4th most famous Romanian Writer. Her biography has been translated into 107 different languages.

Herta Müller (German: [ˈhɛʁta ˈmʏlɐ] ; born 17 August 1953) is a Romanian-German novelist, poet, essayist and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born in Nițchidorf (German: Niczkydorf; Hungarian: Niczkyfalva), Timiș County in Romania; her native language is German. Since the early 1990s, she has been internationally established, and her works have been translated into more than twenty languages. Müller is noted for her works depicting the effects of violence, cruelty and terror, usually in the setting of the Socialist Republic of Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceaușescu regime which she has experienced herself. Many of her works are told from the viewpoint of the German minority in Romania and are also a depiction of the modern history of the Germans in the Banat and Transylvania. Her much acclaimed 2009 novel The Hunger Angel (Atemschaukel) portrays the deportation of Romania's German minority to Soviet Gulags during the Soviet occupation of Romania for use as German forced labour. Müller has received more than twenty awards to date, including the Kleist Prize (1994), the Aristeion Prize (1995), the International Dublin Literary Award (1998) and the Franz Werfel Human Rights Award (2009). On 8 October 2009, the Swedish Academy announced that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, describing her as a woman "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed".

5. Elie Wiesel (1928 - 2016)

With an HPI of 66.51, Elie Wiesel is the 5th most famous Romanian Writer. His biography has been translated into 79 different languages.

Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel ( EL-ee vee-ZEL or EE-ly VEE-səl; Yiddish: אליעזר "אלי" װיזל, romanized: Eliezer "Eli" Vizl; September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016) was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. In his political activities Wiesel became a regular speaker on the subject of the Holocaust and remained a strong defender of human rights during his lifetime. He also advocated for many other causes like the state of Israel and against Hamas and victims of oppression including Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, the apartheid in South Africa, the Bosnian genocide, Sudan, the Kurds and the Armenian genocide, Argentina's Desaparecidos or Nicaragua's Miskito people. He was a professor of the humanities at Boston University, which created the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies in his honor. He was involved with Jewish causes and human rights causes and helped establish the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Wiesel was awarded various prestigious awards including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He was a founding board member of the New York Human Rights Foundation and remained active in it throughout his life.

6. Jacob L. Moreno (1889 - 1974)

With an HPI of 66.33, Jacob L. Moreno is the 6th most famous Romanian Writer. His biography has been translated into 33 different languages.

Jacob Levy Moreno (born Iacob Levy; May 18, 1889 – May 14, 1974) was a Romanian-American psychiatrist, psychosociologist, and educator, the founder of psychodrama, and the foremost pioneer of group psychotherapy. During his lifetime, he was recognized as one of the leading social scientists. Jacob Levy Moreno was born in Bucharest in the Kingdom of Romania. His father was Moreno Nissim Levy, a Sephardi Jewish merchant born in 1856 in Plevna in the Ottoman Empire (today Pleven, Bulgaria). Jacob's grandfather Buchis had moved to Plevna from Constantinople, where his ancestors had settled after they left Spain in 1492. It is thought that the Morenos left Plevna for Bucharest during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, following the Plevna rabbi Haim Bejarano in search of a more hospitable environment. Jacob Moreno's mother, Paulina Iancu or Wolf, was also a Sephardi Jew, born in 1873, and originated from Călăraşi, Romania. In 1895, a time of great intellectual creativity and political turmoil, the family moved to Vienna. He studied medicine, mathematics, and philosophy at the University of Vienna, becoming a Doctor of Medicine in 1917. He had rejected Freudian theory while still a medical student, and became interested in the potential of group settings for therapeutic practice. In his autobiography, Moreno wrote of encounter with Sigmund Freud in 1912. "I attended one of Freud's lectures. He had just finished an analysis of a telepathic dream. As the students filed out, he singled me out from the crowd and asked me what I was doing. I responded, 'Well, Dr. Freud, I start where you leave off. You meet people in the artificial setting of your office. I meet them on the street and in their homes, in their natural surroundings. You analyze their dreams. I give them the courage to dream again. You analyze and tear them apart. I let them act out their conflicting roles and help them to put the parts back together again.'" In Brooklyn, New York, Moreno married Beatrice Beecher in 1926. The marriage ended in divorce, and in 1938 he married Florence Bridge, with whom he had one child, Regina Moreno (born 1939). They too were divorced, and he married Zerka Toeman in 1949, with whom he had one child Jonathan D. Moreno (born 1952). While living in Vienna in the early 1900s Moreno started an improvisational theater company, Stegreiftheater, the Theater of Spontaneity : 72 where he formulated a form of psychotherapy he called psychodrama, which employed improvised dramatizations, role-plays and other therapeutic, spontaneous dramatic expressions that utilized and unleashed the spontaneity and creativity of the group and its individual members.: 15, 16 Moreno saw "psychodrama as the next logical step beyond psychoanalysis." It was "an opportunity to get into action instead of just talking, to take the role of the important people in our lives to understand them better, to confront them imaginatively in the safety of the therapeutic theater, and most of all to become more creative and spotantaneous human beings.": 50 In his book Who Shall Survive? (Preludes, p.xxviii) Moreno wrote of the genesis of his Group Psychotherapy in 1913–14 in Vienna, formulating his ideas while working with groups of prostitutes. Moving to the US in 1925, he began working in New York City. There, Moreno worked on his theory of interpersonal relations, and the development of his work in psychodrama, sociometry, group psychotherapy, sociodrama, and sociatry. In his autobiography he wrote "only in New York, the melting pot of the nations, the vast metropolis, with all its freedom from all preconceived notions, could I be free to pursue sociometric group research in the grand style I had envisioned". The New York Times wrote "He found that acceptance of his theories was slow, particularly because some colleagues deplored his showmanship." He worked at the Plymouth Institute, Brooklyn, and at Mount Sinai Hospital. In 1929, he founded an Impromptu Theater at Carnegie Hall and later did work at the Guild Theater. He made studies of sociometry at Sing Sing Prison in 1931. In 1932, Moreno first introduced group psychotherapy to the American Psychiatric Association, and co-authored the monograph Group Method and Group Pschotherapy with Helen Hall Jennings. He and Jennings were the first to use a stochastic network model (or, "chance sociogram", as they called it), predating the Erdős–Rényi model and the network model of Anatol Rapoport. In 1936, he founded the Beacon Hill Sanitarium, and the adjacent Therapeutic Theater. In 1937–1938, he taught a university seminar on psychodrama ("Introduction to Psychodrama") at Columbia University under the auspices of the Guidence Laboratory, Teachers College. He later taught a seminar "On Sociometry" with and by invitation of Dr. Alvin Saunders Johnson at the New School for Social Research. For the next 40 years he developed and introduced his Theory of Interpersonal Relations and tools for social sciences he called 'sociodrama', 'psychodrama', 'sociometry', and 'sociatry'. In his monograph entitled, "The Future of Man's World", he describes how he developed these sciences to counteract "the economic materialism of Marx, the psychological materialism of Freud, and the technological materialism" of our modern industrial age. In 1954, he was a founding member of the International Committee on Group Psychotherapy, which later transformed into the International Association of Group Psychotherapy. His autobiography describes his position as "threefold: Spontaneity and creativity are the propelling forces in human progress, beyond and independent of libido and socioeconomic motives [that] are frequently interwoven with spontaneity-creativity, but [this proposition] does deny that spontaneity and creativity are merely a function and derivative of libido or socioeconomic motives. Love and mutual sharing are powerful, indispensable working principles in group life. Therefore, it is imperative that we have faith in our fellow man's intentions, a faith which transcends mere obedience arising from physical or legalistic coercion. That a super dynamic community based on these principles can be brought to realization through new techniques..." Moreno died at home in Beacon, N.Y., in 1974, aged 84. He chose to die by abstaining from all food and water after a long illness. His ashes are buried at Feuerhalle Simmering in Vienna. His epitaph, at his request, reads "DER MANN, DER FREUDE UND LACHEN IN DIE PSYCHIATRIE BRACHTE" (The man who brought joy and laughter to psychiatry). There is evidence that the methods of J. L. Moreno have held up respectably over time. Subsequent research from the University of Vienna shows the enormous influence that Moreno's theory of the Encounter (Invitations to an Encounter, 1914) had on the development of Martin Buber's I-Thou philosophy, and Buber's influence on philosophy, theology, and psychology. His wife, Zerka Moreno, wrote: "While it is true that Buber broadened the idea of the Encounter, he did not create the instruments for it to occur." Moreno "produced the various instruments we now use for facilitating the human encounter, sociometry, group psychotherapy, psychodrama, and sociodrama". Zerka was herself an expert in psychodrama and sociometry, and continued her late husband's work. With training centers and institutes on nearly every continent, there are many thousands of students who are expanding and developing training and teaching the Morenean Arts and Sciences across the disciplines, to more fully realize Moreno's vision to make these social sciences available for "the whole of [hu]mankind." Moreno is also widely credited as one of the founders of the discipline of social network analysis, the branch of sociology that deals with the quantitative evaluation of an individual's role in a group or community by analysis of the network of connections between them and others.: 21, 22 His 1934 book Who Shall Survive? contains some of the earliest graphical depictions of social networks (sociograms). In this book, he introduced a famous explanation, why a pandemic of runaways emerged at the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson. Sociograms Moreno, J. L. (1932). First Book on Group Therapy. Beacon House. Moreno, J. L. (1934). Who Shall Survive? A new Approach to the Problem of Human Interrelations. Beacon House. ISBN 978-9992695722 Moreno, J. L. (1941). The Words of the Father. Beacon House. ISBN 978-1446601853 Moreno, J. L. (1946). Psychodrama Volume 1. Beacon House. Moreno, J. L. (1947). The Theatre of Spontaneity Beacon House. ISBN 978-1445777139 Moreno, J. L. (1951). Sociometry, Experimental Method and the Science of Society: An Approach to a New Political Orientation. Beacon House. ISBN 978-1291121759 Moreno, J. L. (1953). Who Shall Survive? Foundations of Sociometry, Group Psychotherapy and Sociodrama. Beacon House. Moreno, J. L. (1956). Sociometry and the Science of Man. Beacon House. Moreno, J. L. (1959). Psychodrama Volume 2: Foundations of Psychodrama. Beacon House. Moreno, J. L. (1960). The Sociometry Reader. Beacon House. Moreno, J. L., Moreno, Z. T., Moreno, J. D. (1964). The First Psychodramatic Family. Beacon House. Moreno, J. L. (1966). The International Handbook of Group Psychotherapy. Philosophical Library. Moreno, J. L. (1969). Psychodrama Volume 3: Action Therapy and Principles of Practice. Beacon House. Moreno, J. L. (1989). Preludes of my Autobiography. Beacon House. Marineau, René. (1992) Jacob Levy Moreno 1889-1974: father of psychodrama, sociometry and group psychotherapy. Create Space Independent Publishing Platform. Moreno, Jonathan D. (2014) Impromptu Man: J.L. Moreno and the Origins of Psychodrama, Encounter Culture, and the Social Network. Bellevue Literary Press. Nolte, John. (2014) The Philosophy, Theory and Methods of J. L. Moreno: The Man Who Tried to Become God (Explorations in Mental Health). Routledge. Psychodrama and Life with J.L. Moreno: An Interview with Zerka Moreno (Psychotherapy.net) Jacob Levy Moreno - his life and his muses. A film by Marco J. D. Maida, brasilian psychodramatist Jonathan Moreno's "Impromptu Man: J.L. Moreno and the Origins of Psychodrama, Encounter Culture, and the Social Network" (Radio Times, WHYY Philadelphia) Jacob L. Moreno papers, 1906, 1911-1977 (inclusive). B MS c66. Harvard Medical Library, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, Mass. Zerka T. Moreno papers, 1930-2010 (inclusive), 1957-2000 (bulk). H MS c163. Harvard Medical Library, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, Mass.

7. Dimitrie Cantemir (1673 - 1723)

With an HPI of 65.56, Dimitrie Cantemir is the 7th most famous Romanian Writer. His biography has been translated into 43 different languages.

Dimitrie or Demetrius Cantemir (Romanian pronunciation: [diˈmitri.e kanteˈmir] , Russian: Дмитрий Кантемир; 26 October 1673 – 21 August 1723), also known by other spellings, was a Moldavian prince, statesman, and man of letters. He twice served as voivode of Moldavia (March–April 1693 and 1710–1711). During his second term he allied his state with Russia in a war against Moldavia's Ottoman overlords; Russia's defeat forced Cantemir's family into exile and the replacement of the native voivodes by Greek phanariots. Cantemir was also a prolific writer, variously a philosopher, historian, composer, musicologist, linguist, ethnographer, and geographer. His son Antioch, Russia's ambassador to Great Britain and France and a friend of Montesquieu and Voltaire, would become known as "the father of Russian poetry".

8. Mihai Eminescu (1850 - 1889)

With an HPI of 65.33, Mihai Eminescu is the 8th most famous Romanian Writer. His biography has been translated into 67 different languages.

Mihai Eminescu (Romanian pronunciation: [miˈhaj emiˈnesku] ; born Mihail Eminovici; 15 January 1850 – 15 June 1889) was a Romanian Romantic poet from Moldavia, novelist, and journalist, generally regarded as the most famous and influential Romanian poet. Eminescu was an active member of the Junimea literary society and worked as an editor for the newspaper Timpul ("The Time"), the official newspaper of the Conservative Party (1880–1918). His poetry was first published when he was 16 and he went to Vienna, Austria to study when he was 19. The poet's manuscripts, containing 46 volumes and approximately 14,000 pages, were offered by Titu Maiorescu as a gift to the Romanian Academy during the meeting that was held on 25 January 1902. Notable works include Luceafărul (The Vesper/The Evening Star/The Lucifer/The Daystar), Odă în metru antic (Ode in Ancient Meter), and the five Letters (Epistles/Satires). In his poems, he frequently used metaphysical, mythological and historical subjects. His father was Gheorghe Eminovici, an aristocrat from Bukovina, which was then part of the Austrian Empire (while his grandfather came from Banat). He crossed the border into Moldavia, settling in Ipotești, near the town of Botoșani. He married Raluca Iurașcu, an heiress of an old noble family. In a Junimea register, Eminescu wrote down his birth date as 22 December 1849, while in the documents of Cernăuți Gymnasium, where Eminescu studied, his birth date is 15 January 1850. Nevertheless, Titu Maiorescu, in his work Eminescu and His Poems (1889) quoted N. D. Giurescu's research and adopted his conclusion regarding the date and place of Mihai Eminescu's birth, as being 15 January 1850, in Botoșani. This date resulted from several sources, among which there was a file of notes on christenings from the archives of the Uspenia (Princely) Church of Botoșani; inside this file, the date of birth was "15 January 1850" and the date of christening was the 21st of the same month. The date of his birth was confirmed by the poet's elder sister, Aglae Drogli, who affirmed that the place of birth was the village of Ipotești, Botoșani County.

9. Panait Istrati (1884 - 1935)

With an HPI of 62.08, Panait Istrati is the 9th most famous Romanian Writer. His biography has been translated into 33 different languages.

Panait Istrati (Romanian: [panaˈit isˈtrati]; sometimes rendered as Panaït Istrati; August 10, 1884 – April 16, 1935) was a Romanian working class writer, who wrote in French and Romanian, nicknamed The Maxim Gorky of the Balkans. Istrati appears to be the first Romanian author explicitly depicting a homosexual character in his work.

10. Dositej Obradović (1742 - 1811)

With an HPI of 61.02, Dositej Obradović is the 10th most famous Romanian Writer. His biography has been translated into 38 different languages.

Dositej Obradović (Serbian Cyrillic: Доситеј Обрадовић, Serbian pronunciation: [dɔsǐtɛːj ɔbrǎːdɔʋitɕ]; 17 February 1739 – 7 April 1811) was a Serbian writer, biographer, diarist, philosopher, pedagogue, educational reformer, linguist, polyglot and the first minister of education of Serbia. An influential protagonist of the Serbian national and cultural renaissance, he advocated Enlightenment and rationalist ideas, while remaining a Serbian patriot and an adherent of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

People

Pantheon has 62 people classified as Romanian writers born between 1510 and 1981. Of these 62, 9 (14.52%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living Romanian writers include Herta Müller, Mircea Cărtărescu, and Ana Blandiana. The most famous deceased Romanian writers include Eugène Ionesco, Tristan Tzara, and Paul Celan. As of April 2024, 5 new Romanian writers have been added to Pantheon including Richard Wagner, Marin Preda, and George Călinescu.