graduated with high honors from the high school (liceu) Ștefan cel Mare in his home town, Suceava. He studied engineering at the Construction Institute in Bucharest and graduated with master's degree in hydro-technique in 1959, working afterwards in planning, fieldwork and research. He has devoted himself to writing since 1974. Literary career In 1966, his literary debut took place in Povestea Vorbii (The Story of Speech), an avant-garde and influential magazine that appeared in the early years of cultural liberalization in communist Romania and was suppressed after six issues. Until he was forced into exile (1986) he published ten volumes of short fiction essays and novels. His work was an irritant to the authorities because of the implied and overt social-political criticism and he faced a lot of trouble with the censors and the official press. At the same time that sustained efforts were made by the cultural authorities to suppress his work, it had the support and praise of the country's most important literary critics. After the collapse of the Ceaușescu dictatorship, several of his books started to be published in Romania. The publication in a Romanian translation of his essay Happy Guilt, which first appeared in The New Republic, led to a nationalist outcry in Romania, which he in turn has analysed in depth in his essay "Blasphemy and Carnival". Echoes of this scandal can still be found in some articles of the current Romanian cultural press. Meantime, in the United States and in European countries, Manea's writing was received with great acclaim. Over the past two decades he has been proposed as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature by literary and academic personalities and institutions in the United States, Sweden, Romania, Italy and France. Important contemporary writers expressed admiration of the author's literary work and his moral stand before and after the collapse of communism: the Nobel laureates Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Octavio Paz, Orhan Pamuk, as well as Philip Roth, Claudio Magris, Antonio Tabucchi, E. M. Cioran, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Cynthia Ozick, Louis Begley and others. Honors 1979 – Literary Prize of the Bucharest Writers' Association (Romania) 1984 – Literary Prize of the Romanian Writer's Union (withdrawn by the Communist authorities) 1987 – DAAD Berliner Künstler Programm Grant (Germany) 1988 – Fulbright Scholarship, Catholic University, Washington, DC (USA) 1989–1992 – International Academy for Scholarship and the Arts Fellowship, Bard College (USA) 1992 – Guggenheim