Over 40 titles, translated into 18 languages: more
Balkanism, Identity, Literature (interview)
NOW: “The message of one of the most famous writers” in HotNews
Doina Ruști is also indexed in some international catalogues as Doina Rusti or Cornelia Doina Rusti.
Her novels and short stories have received major awards, been translated into several languages, and are studied in schools, enjoying wide critical recognition. Her work is marked by the blending of the fantastic with stark social realism. Her landmark novel is The Ghost in the Mill (2008), a powerful fiction about Romanian communism, included in the post-communist neo-Gothic both in J. A. Weinstock’s Routledge encyclopediaand in Studies in Gothic Fiction (Zittaw Press). Thematically complementary, Ferenike (Humanitas, 2025) is her most personal novel, a political and autobiographical fiction about memory, guilt, and feminine resistance.
Doina Ruști is „a writer of the first rank in today’s literature", in the words of Nicolae Breban , and „a writer of great talent and intuition”, as Norman Manea has described her, distinguished by a powerful and vibrant style.
Equally acclaimed is Lizoanca at Eleven (2009), a novel about child prostitution, whose style was compared by Western critics to Camus’s The Plague (Il Libero), and which has been included in several European academic programs, among them the Doctoral School of the University of Barcelona.
The Phanariot Trilogy—The Phanariot Manuscript, The Book of Perilous Dishes (Mâța Vinerii), and Homeric—has enjoyed wide popularity. These novels explore the 18th-century Balkan imagination in an original, fabulatory mode that reinterprets history. Mircea Muthu devoted a chapter to her work in his volume Romanian Literary Balkanism. Among these, The Book of Perilous Dishes is the most widely translated, published in English in London (2022), recommended by EUFestival and featured by the Historical Novel Society.
Doina Ruști has also published ten other novels, among her recent titles Zavaidoc in the Year of Love (2024), Occult Beds (2020), and two successful YA novels (Platanos and Sălbatica).
Dan C. Mihăilescu has likened her style to that of Mircea Cărtărescu and Patrick Süskind, while Paul Cernat considers her “a novelist endowed with epic vigor and inner strength.”
Her distinctions include the Writers’ Union Prize (Bucharest Association, 2007), the Romanian Writers’ Union Prize for Prose (2008), the Ion Creangă Prize of the Romanian Academy (2009), and the Hungarian Writers’ Prize (Budapest, 2018) for Best Translated Book.
She is a university professor specializing in cultural history and world civilization.
Website: www.doinarusti.ro
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2919952.Doina_Ru_ti
https://www.tiktok.com/@doinarusti
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doinarusti
L’isola delle Storie, Sardinia, 2018: Roberto Merlo, Simonetta Bitasi, Doina Ruști, Omar di Monopoli and Marcello Fois
Doina Ruști / Doina Rusti
Guest on Altceva cu Adrian Artene
Interview by writer Nesrein El-Bakhshawangy, Al Majalla, Cairo
Hot News: Doina Ruști, at Cabinetul Perspektive
Born on 15 Feb 1957 in Comoșteni. With Aromanian ancestors who came from Montenegro, as well as Turkish, Jewish, and—above all—Danubian Romanian roots, Doina Ruști writes prose marked by an accentuated Balkanism and an imagination fed by diverse sources. She spent her childhood in a village in southern Romania (Comoșteni), in a family of schoolteachers who made great efforts to survive in a communist world. The absurd rules and the chaos installed at the end of the dictatorship surface fictionally in Fantoma din moară, a novel that brings forth a fabulous universe ruled by ghosts and hierophanies, and that sharply raises the question of identity in a totalitarian world—ideologically constrained and deprived of intimacy. The novel received the Romanian Writers’ Union Prize and was considered “one of the most convincing and expressive fictions about local communism published in the last decade” (Paul Cernat).
Translated into German, it received enthusiastic reviews in Neue Zürcher Zeitung:
“Doina Ruști’s book displays a wide range of literary abilities, measuring the resilience found in twentieth-century Romanian history.”
Confessions: a chat with Eugen Istodor, on Hot News (video)
In the Encyclopedia by J. A. Weinstock,
The novel The Ghost in the Mill is framed within a neo-Gothic style, opening a new direction in Eastern literature dealing with totalitarianism. The magical realism known from South American literature expands here into a form of the fantastic that metaphorizes the horrors of a closed world and of censored lives.
In the same fantastic register, with neo-Gothic accents, are other novels as well. Zogru (translated into Italian, Hungarian, Spanish, Bulgarian) creates an unusual character and a type of fantastic related to the world of Chagall’s paintings, as a daily newspaper in Santiago de Chile remarked:
“Full of humor in some sequences, in others tragic and fierce, sometimes fantastic and luminous, like a Chagall painting, what predominates in this wonderful story is the figure of the terrible loneliness in which the human spirit finds itself when deprived of love.” (Pedro Gandolfo, El Mercurio)
The story outlines the conflict through a vision placed at the boundary between fantasy and indisputable history.
Awarded the Writers’ Union Prize, the novel Zogru also benefited from a scholarship from the Hungarian government and from enthusiastic reviews.
Written in the same manner are the novels Omulețul roșu (2004), Homeric (2019), and Paturi oculte (2021), but above all Mâța Vinerii. The latter, probably her most translated novel, was praised for its imaginative world and for its style:
“Mâța Vinerii—a stylistic jubilation, a vital literature, like Süskind’s Perfume up to a point and Evgheni Vodolazkin’s Laurus from another point onward.” (Dan C. Mihăilescu). integral
The Doina Ruști’debut.
The novel Mâța Vinerii received the Hungarian Writers’ Union Prize (Budapest) for its exceptional translation, signed by Szenkovics Enikő (Budapest, 2017).
A special place is held by the novel The Phanariot Manuscript (2015), partially translated (into English, Turkish, Italian, and French) and fully translated into Albanian.
Inspired by an authentic document from the 18th century, the novel approaches a form of magical realism—fabulist and at times lyrical. The most recent edition is from 2026, Litera, in the author’s series.
“Manuscrisul fanariot is a sumptuous book, contagiously sensual. It is a poem dedicated to Phanariot Bucharest—an urb, or rather an improvised urban sprawl—rocking day and night to the languid rhythm of manele, sunk in the smoke of pipes, superstitions, rumors, and magical oriental aromas, and from time to time assaulted by endemic frenzies without object, by heavy sorrows and nameless melancholies.
If it were only that, it would still be enough.
But the story of an impossible love that shatters customs, which Doina Ruști tells us—supported by documents and with her well-known talent—lifts the curtain on a world of habits, merciless private relations, surprising behaviors, and strange habitudes that throw into perplexity even the critic with solid historical knowledge.”
The Phanariot Trilogy: The Phanariot Manuscript, The Book of Perilous Dishes, and Homeric.
Producer Ada Solomon recommends Lizoanca by Doina Ruști
Other novels adopt neo-realism. Among them, Lizoanca la 11 ani, about which the press at home and abroad wrote in superlatives, received the Romanian Academy’s “Ion Creangă” Prize in 2009.
“The trauma of Romanian society, the post-December one, is born from identity crises, from turbulence and violence with profound human implications. We thus identify a series of mature women writers—such as Ana Blandiana, Gabriela Adameșteanu, Doina Ruști, Simona Popescu, Magda Cârneci, or Herta Müller—who do not all employ autofiction, but who are adepts of the geography of memory, offering a writing of identity construction.” —
Oana Larisa Oanea, PhD thesis.
Hot News: interview with Doina Ruști about Lizoanca
The literary value of the novel was often discussed (La Opinion - Murcia, La Jornada, Mexico) as well as the truthfulness of the writing:
“Doina Ruști, with a gradually unfolding story, prolongs pain and horror to unsuspected limits, bringing causes to the surface. She managed to write about that dark and even invisible part of society, placing under question many of its essential elements. Doina Ruști has the rare capacity to capture the hypocrisy of individuals and society, violences of every kind under the most innocuous forms, and at the same time—beneath the slow epic unfolding—these violences maintain a constant erosive function. A pictorial and cinematic writing, also given by her perfect use of comparison.”
Ramón Acín, Turia, 2015.
A daily newspaper in Budapest places Lizoanca la 11 ani among the best translated books in 2015, alongside Houellebecq’s Submission, and Il Libero (Turin) compares her style to Camus’s The Plague.
Thematically continuing The Ghost in the Mill, the autobiographical novel Ferenike illustrates the experience of communism from a subjective perspective, at times with fabulatory elements. Considered a work that brings reality back into the realm of myth, the novel has been compared to The Killing of a Sacred Deer by Yorgos Lanthimos, which reactivates the tragic mechanism of punishing a hybris. (România literară).
In many of her works there is a ritual murder, a subtle reference to a sacrificial act meant to redeem history—concealed, yet constantly connected to the immediate present.
Logodnica, Mămica la două albăstrele and, in part, Fantoma din moară follow the same tendency.
With great thematic diversity, her writings address above all the erosion of the family (Lizoanca, Logodnica, Mămica la două albăstrele), psychology and women’s issues (Omulețul roșu, Fantoma din moară, Mămica la două albăstrele, Ferenike, Zavaidoc). She is often concerned with the causes of aggression. Many novels treat the theme of abortion, from the historical causes triggered by Ceaușescu’s anti-abortion decree (Ferenike, Fantoma din moară, Zogru, Ginecologii mei etc.) to the cruelties of social rules traced historically (Homeric, Manuscrisul fanariot, Zavaidocetc.).
The metamorphoses of history and the linguistic labyrinth contribute substantially to defining the Romanian space, with all its Balkan, Levantine, and Slavic influences. From the complex architecture supported by a symbolic lexicon (in Manuscrisul fanariot) to the cinematic unfoldings in Homeric, Zogru, Mâța Vinerii and the many themes in the Phanariot short stories, everything outlines a dense universe whose stories flow so naturally that they infect you, often creating models. A relevant example of this kind of imagination is Manuscrisul fanariot, a novel written in the register of a fable that incorporates, in every action, collective desires.
Bozăria was boiling. The embrace, postponed for so long, had stirred up the mud, scattering sparks and little eyes hidden under the blanket of embers. Among the tired leaves, thousands of invisible mouths let out their sighs—those small mouths, hidden in the folds of the world. Mouths that had not eaten, overtaken by a single craving. Mouths that shout, mouths that whisper for a single being. Inflamed mouths, bitten by other mouths hunted by death. Small mouths, coming out from under warmed skirts, from the hot pleats of shalvar trousers—mouths that keep alive any wretched little soul, from the louse forgotten in the filth under the nails, to the prince who lounges covered in rags. No pride of the brain is possible without the thousands of mouths of the human dream.
And these yearning mouths, born of an embrace postponed too long, invaded the city. (Manuscrisul fanariot)
And the short stories, especially the series of urban legends, preserve the same pattern.
The dominant theme of her writing, however, remains communism, understood as a system of collective degradation. Omulețul roșu (The Little Red Man)offers a symbolic, episodic image of a controlled collectivity. In Zogru, a miniature history of communism unfolds, from the proletarian assault to the commercial activism of the 1980s. The novel The Ghost in the Mill constructs a complex parable of the communist camp, while Ferenike provides a subjective vision of the same historical reality. There is hardly a novel by Doina Ruști without references to communism.
I was not interested in writing about the way ideology was used in the infernal Stalinist era, but rather in completing the picture of the complex methods through which a person, cornered by demagoguery, learns to survive. (Dialogue with Daniel Cristea-Enache)
Lizoanca at the Age of Eleven follows the mechanisms of post-communist degradation, rooted in the 1950s. Sălbatica (The Wild One)is a novel about the deportations to the Bărăgan Plain. Even in Zavaidoc in the Year of Love, the fabulous roaring 1920s are complemented by a substantial incursion into the communism of the 1960s.
Omulețul roșu received positive reviews in Romania and Italy, praised both for the originality of its expression (La Stampa) and for the complexity of its subject (Il Venerdì di Repubblica), as well as for its type of fantastic (Stato).
“…a hallucinatory, convulsive, absurd yet coherent world, as real as fantasy can be, a bizarre and unpredictable electronic Wonderland in which Laura ventures, enchanted and indomitable, like a telematic Alice.”
Roberto Merlo — “Ritorno a Babele”, Neos Edizioni, 2016, Turin
Concerned with both the fantastic register and the realistic one, Doina Ruști manages to write equally convincingly about the atrocities of the contemporary world and about lofty ideals. Her characters—whether realistic or fantastic—are memorable and striking. In her novels one often finds rapists, killers, starving people, the corrupt, and those consumed by petty ideals.
Phanariot Trilogy: anniversary
Yet with the same sure hand of a seasoned novelist, Doina Ruști also builds fantastic characters—elves, sprites, ghosts, bewitched tomcats, and wizards—which led some critics to compare her work to that of Bulgakov, Süskind, or Márquez (apud Dan C. Mihăilescu, Bojidar Kuncev).
The diverse themes, strongly anchored in the present, as well as “Doina Ruști’s rare capacity to shift narrative registers with ease, place her among the foremost writers of contemporary Romanian literature” (Nicolae Breban).
Doina Ruști, Nicolae Breban
In the novel Zavaidoc în anul iubirii (2024), she experiments with a confessional style unfolded from three perspectives, composing the love story of an interwar musician (Zavaidoc), in relation to the sensational news of the year 1923.
Carrying the confessional style further, in the novel Ferenike (2025), an overtly autobiographical writing, she builds the narration on self-projections across different periods of time—hence the impression of a branched epic built on progressive moments of action.
In a confessional style are written (partly or entirely) the novels The Little Red Man, The Ghost in the Mill, Four Men plus Aurelius, The Book of Perilous Dishes, Homeric, Bulgarian Nose.
EU-China Literary Festival.
Doina Ruști lives in Bucharest and holds the academic title of university professor, specializing in the history of culture and universal civilization.
She directed a short film, based on her short story, Cristian, which premiered at Cannes in 2015.
At the National Theatre of Bucharest, with BookLand
Among other things, she initiated the magazines Ficțiunea and Cinematographic Art, and the Biblioteca de Proză Contemporană collection at Editura Litera, being involved in numerous activities: she was Director of the Media Pro Cultural Center, Dean of the Journalism Faculty at the Media University, a script specialist at Media Pro Pictures, a professor at UNATC, Universitatea Media, and the University of Bucharest, Head of Department at Hyperion University, and a member of international scientific councils and societies. She has written over 30 nonfiction books and around 50 scholarly articles, collaborating with prestigious journals, such as Umberto Eco’s Semiotica and Eighteenth Century Studies. She has served on doctoral committees and on committees for awarding academic titles, on juries for CNC, CENNAC, ICR, etc.—complementary activities, while at the center remains prose, as her principal occupation.
She signs with the pen name Ruști, convinced that giving up the name of one’s ancestors is among the great trials of a human being.
Her writings have benefited from exegetical works and academic studies, and from laudatory reviews in international newspapers and literary magazines, including El Mercurio (Santiago de Chile), Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Il Manifesto, Las Últimas Noticias, La Jornada (Mexico City), Stato Quotidiano, Turia, La Stampa, La Opinión, Il Libero, Magyar Nemzet, La Repubblica, Beijing Daily and others.
Web page: http://doinarusti.ro
(summary by Elena Costea, after the monograph signed by Pompilia Chifu: Doina Ruști, un personaj în propria carte, Casa Cărții de Știință, 2025.)
Literary networks and thematic resonances: Mircea Cărtărescu, Gabriela Adameșteanu, Herta Müller, Olga Tokarczuk, Mariana Enriquez. More
Featured guest on ALTCEVA cu Adrian Artene – Romania’s most-watched cultural podcast (2025)
The Phanariot Manuscript în Sardinia
Literary events with Doina Ruști, Mircea Cărtărescu, Gabriela Adameșteanu. Other literary meetings.
The most striking quality of Doina Ruști’s writing, visible across all her books, is the imaginative verve from which stories are woven, the inexhaustible energy from which characters and narrative threads are born. Although cast in the conventions of the historical novel, the prose D.R. writes uses historical hypotheses as pretexts to explore fantastic scenarios, intertwining fiction with metafiction in an alloy of magical realism that brings her close to the great South American masters, with whose writing many correspondences can be established. The fabulous stories in Zogru, Mâța Vinerii, Fantoma din moară or Manuscrisul fanariot are, almost every time, also stories about the writing of the story itself—subtle metanarratives about the nature of fiction, its status, and its relationship with reality. (Dumitru Mircea Buda)
https://www.doinarusti.ro/doina-rusti-dictionar-de-simboluri-din-opera-lui-mircea-eliade.html
Dicționar de simboluri din opera lui Mircea Eliade appeared in 1997 at Coresi.
It is the first Romanian exegesis published after the fall of communism to examine Eliade’s work as a whole, encompassing both his fiction and his scholarly writings.
. It contains nearly 100 symbols, arranged in two major categories: 1. fundamental oppositions and 2. coincidentia oppositorum (the harmony of opposites).
This is her debut book. More.
I N T E R V I E W, Digi 24, 2025
Leipzig, 2018: Doina Ruști & Filip Florian
“What does the world hide in books? Money? Love notes? Pressed flowers?
He wrote, seduced by the watery ink, watching it dry, remembering, for a flash of a second, his teacher Poenaru’s endless ink—without letting that old memory pull him away from the military letters or from the persistent thought that his writing might die soon, wiped away by unleashed waters, or along with the paper torn to pieces by the hands of an unknown person. Of course, he wasn’t thinking about eternity, only about that victorious time when his eyes would decipher this first letter. Which meant a long, dusty road, seen with the mind’s eye like a typhoon rising from the basket of a colorless mail coach…”
Doina Ruști — Open source, novel in progress
Paturi oculte, Litera, 2023
Cămașa în carouri, 2023
Fantoma din moară, 2024
Mâța Vinerii, 2024
Mămica la două albăstrele, 2024
Manuscrisul fanariot, 2026
Books at Altex
Doina Ruști is an active member of the Romanian Writers’ Union, PEN Club Romania, and the Association of Fiction Creators (ACF).
She is also affiliated with Dacin-Sara and Copyro (literary rights).
She collaborates editorially with the main Romanian publishers—Humanitas, ART, Polirom, Litera,Vremea—and Bookzone, and she is involved in numerous international events.
EU–China Literary Festival, Neem Tree Press (UK), Historical Novel Society
(USA).
Among other invitations, she was a guest of the Festivalul L’Isola delle Storie – Gavoi (Sardinia, Italy), of the EU–China Festival organized by the European Union, and she had a one-month residency in Beijing.
She is a regular contributor to Ficțiunea, one of Romania’s most important literary platforms.
Her work has been presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair,
Leipziger Messe, Festival du Livre de Paris, Salone del Libro di Torino, Festivaletteratura Mantua, etc.
Paris (2023), London (2022), Belgrade (2023), Madrid (2019),
Guangzhou, Shenzhen (2018), Gavoi (2018), Santiago de Chile (2018), Istanbul (2015), Barcelona (2014), Budapest (2007, 2014, 2015, 2018, 2024), Vienna (2008), Plovdiv (2009), Torino (2009, 2011, 2012, 2013), Frankfurt (2009, 2018), (2010, 2013, 2018), Moscow (2010), Rome (2011, 2012), Granada (2011, 2019),
Düsseldorf (2013), Berlin (2013).
“Read, boys, what women have written about you!” — the motto of her literary dialogue.
I was kind of an explorer. I was expecting to discover amazing things, different from what my family discovered in the books they had read. My father loved poetry. My grandmother was reading contemporary novels, often Romanian ones. My mother was fond of the emotional romance books. And my grandfather’s reading taste was extremely diverse. Besides, he was the only one in the family who was reading even the newspaper. In this context, I secretly started to read Balzac at the age of 14. And not just one, but his entire volumes from our library shelf. The broad phrase and the solid structure of his novels gave me such comfort that I was convinced that I would not read any other writer for the rest of my life. Balzac was my first love or, in other words, that perfume that evaporates whenever one wants to retrieve it.
Doina Duști & her Family
Contemporary Writers, with
2007-2008 Training internship: Story editing, Script editing. Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning (WBL) & Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy (NRDC). Coord. John Vorhaus.
2000 Ph.D, University from Bucharest
1976-1980 Faculty of Philology, "Al. I. Cuza" University, Iași
1972-1976 Garabet Ibraileanu Highschool (Classical Languages), Iași
When I graduated, I was 23 years old and i looked like a starved Asian. I was coming to Bucharest every month, carrying different manuscripts with me and trying to enter a publishing house. Usually there was someone, a janitor, and I could never get past him. Even now I have many files with short prose, that were very fashionable at the time. "The Ghost in the mill" itself dates back to the same period.
Doina Ruști, 1978, student
Bucharest University
Member of The Writers' Union of Romania
Member of PEN Club
Dacin Sara
Doina Ruști — Selected Works
Matuf, the Wigmaker, Humanitas Junior, 2026
Bulgarian Nose (Nas de bulgar), 75.000, Humanitas, 2026
Ferenike, Humanitas)— bestseller, 2025
Platanos, Youngart, Grupul Editorial Art, 2025 .
Zavaidoc in the Year of Love (Zavaidoc în anul iubirii) (2024, Bookzone)
Occult Beds (Paturi oculte) (2020, 2022, Litera)
Homeric (2019, Polirom)
The Book of Perilous Dishes (Mâța Vinerii) (2017, Polirom) — 80,000 words
The Fiancée (Logodnica) (2017, Polirom)
The Phanariot Manuscript (Manuscrisul fanariot) (2015, Polirom; 2022, Litera)
The Story of an Adulterer (Mămica la două albăstrele) (2013, Polirom; Litera 2024, author’s series)
Four Men Plus Aurelius (Patru bărbați plus Aurelius) (2011, Polirom)
The Ghost in the Mill (Fantoma din moară) (2008, 2017, Polirom; 2024, Litera, author series)
Zogru (2006, 2013, Polirom; Litera 2022)
The Little Red Man (Omulețul roșu) (2004, Vremea; 2020, Litera)
About The Little Red Man
„My literary debut and personal manifesto, the novel explores themes of isolation, feminine revolt, and the mutability of narrative itself."
Awarded by Convorbiri Literare magazine. Translated into Italian (two editions).
Frankfurter Buchmesse, 2017: Doina Ruști
Doina Ruști
A collection of eleven fantastical urban stories featuring time travel, miracles, love, and death—where Bucharest itself becomes a living character. The tales are subtly interconnected, culminating in a unified finale. Written in a style reminiscent of Mariana Enriquez. Several stories from this volume have been translated individually into various languages.
Around 50 short stories based on historical records and private manuscripts (lists of found, stolen, or purchased objects, etc.).
A thematic short story collection set in the 18th-century Phanariot era, exploring various acts of debauchery.
English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian, Turkish, Hebrew, Chinese, Danish, Russian, Albanian.
Guangzhou, 2018
Dorëshkrimi fanariot* (Manuscrisul fanariot), trans. Maniela Sota* (2024, Albanian, Prishtina).
A malom kísértete (Fantoma din moară), trans. Szenkovics Enikő. (2024, Budapest)
Zogru, Les Editions du Typhon; Marseille, 2022. Trans. Florica Courriol
The Book of Perilous Dishes, Neem Tree Press, London, 2022, 2024 (trans. James Ch. Brown)
Doina Ruști, London Book Fair, 2022
L’omino rosso, Sandro Teti, Roma, 2021 (trad Roberto Merlo)
Cong Quanshan Dao Pingyuan, trans Siqi Zhu, De Li Zan, Beijing, 2019
La gata del viernes (Mâța Vinerii), trans Enrique Nogueras, Editura Esdrújula Ediciones, Granada, 2019
Freitagskatze (trad Roland Erb), Klak, Berlin, 2018
Zogru trad. Sebastián Teillier, Descontextos Editore, Santiago de Chile, 2018
Das Phantom in der Mühle , trad. Eva Wemme, Klak Verlag, 2017, Berlin
The Truancy, The Stockholm Review Literature
The Phanariot Manuscript (trans Liana Grama), Trafika Europe, Penn State, University Libraries, nr 8, 2016
The lover (trans Andrew Davidson), Trafika Europe, Penn State, University Libraries, nr 8, 2016
Eliza (Lizoanca) trans. Alexandra Kaitozis, Antolog, 2015, Skopje
Eliza a los once años, Ediciones Traspiés, Granada, 2014 (trans Enrique Nogueras)
Lizoanca tizenegy évesen trans. Szenkovics Enikő Orpheusz Kiadó, Budapest, 2015
Fenerlilere ait elyasmasi eser (Manuscrisul fanariot), frag, trans. Leila Unal, Sözcükler , 58, aprilie, 2015, Istanbul
Zogru, Sétatér Kulturális Egyesület, 2014, prin bursa "Franyó Zoltán", oferită de guvernul maghiar (trans Szenkovics Enikő)
Lizoanca, Horlemann Verlag, Berlin, 2013 (trad Jan Cornelius)
Berlin: Jan Cornelius, Doina Ruști, Georg Aescht, Gabriela Adameșteanu.
Lisoanca, Rediviva Edizioni, Milano, 2013 (trad Ingrid Beatrice Coman)
Apartamentul 26, trans. Oana Ursulesku, Koracic, Belgrad, 2013
L’omino rosso, Nikita Editore, Firenze, 2012 (trad Roberto Merlo)
Robero Merlo, Doina Ruști, Marco Dotti, Sabian Trzan
Bill Clinton’s Hand, Bucharest Tales, New Europe Writers, 2011, (coord:A. Fincham, J. G Coon, John a’Beckett)
Kareli gomlek ve Bukreș'teki Bașka On Hadise (Cămașa în carouri și alte 10 întâmplări din București), trans. Cristina Dincer, Kalem Kultur Yaynlari, Istanbul, 2011
I miei ginecologi, in Compagne di viaggio, Sandro Teti Editore, 2011 (trad Anita Bernacchia) (coord Radu Pavel Gheo, Dan Lungu)
Ura pri univerzi, Zgodbe iz Romunije, Sodobnost International, Ljubljiana, 2011.
Zogru (trad. Roberto Merlo), Ed Bonanno, 2010, Roma; Catania
L’omino rosso (trad Roberto Merlo) în Il romanzo romeno contemporaneo, Ed. Bagatto Libri, 2010, Roma.
Roma: Stefano Petrocchi, Mircea Cărtărescu, Doina Ruști, Oana Bocșa Mălin, Horia-Roman Patapievici.
Zogru (frag.) și prezentare biobibliografică, în 11 books contemporary romanian prose, Ed. Polirom, 2006, traducere de Alistair Ian Blyth
Zogru (roman), Balkani Publishing House, Sofia, trad: Vasilka Alexova, 2008.
Învingătorul - antologia revistei Nagyvilag (trad. Noémi László), Budapesta , sept/ 2010
Cristian (trad. în fr. Linda Maria Baros), Paris, rev Le Bateau Fantôme , no. 8, 2009, ed. Mathieu Hilfiger
Cristián (trad. Sebastián Teillier), Madrid, rev. El fantasma de la glorieta, nr. 16/2008,
The begining (poem), in Under a Quicksilver Moon, 2002, SUA, Library of Congress,
Dicționar de simboluri din opera lui Mircea Eliade(frag.) în La Jornada Semanal, nr. 455; 456, 2003 (traducere: José Antonio Hernández García)
Selected film adaptations based on my fiction
– Cristian — short fiction film (writer & director).
Adapted from the short story in The Checkered Shirt.
Selections: Cannes Short Film Corner, Goa Festival, CineFest Los Angeles.
Award: Best Foreign Film – Christian International Film Festival, Florida.
– The Treacherous Shadow of a Love — short fiction film (writer & director).
Adapted from the short story of the same name.
Selections: Ascona Film Festival, Cinefest Los Angeles.
Award: Best Film – RomCon.
– Apartment 26 — short film adaptation (dir. Alexandra Băilă).
Selection: Ascona Film Festival.
– The Scam — short film adaptation (dir. Cristian Panaitescu).
Selection: Ascona Film Festival.
– Cream Truffles — feature film project in development.
Adapted from the short story.
Aici intră:
Comoara naivă
Călugărițele vrăjitoare
Dansul Soarelui
Arhivele Naționale
Miracolul de la Tekir etc.
A Greek Who Gave Up His Freedom in the Eighteenth Century: An Unpublished Document, Eighteenth Century Studies, vol 47, nr 4, Summer 2014
The Film Actor versus The Theater Actor: "Cazul Gavrilescu" (The Gavrilescu Case) and "Pescuit sportiv" (Hooked), European Scientific Journal, vol 10, nr 5 2014, (ISI) . (coautor & Adrian Titieni)
.Communication resources and the consequences of linguistic censorship: The Red Man - rev. Semiotica (Editor in-chief. Marcel Danesi, Mouton de Gruyter), vol 172 - 1/4, p. 261, 2008 (ISI) s.a.
Ateneu (literary magazine) Prize for Prose, 2015
The Romanian Academy Ion CREANGĂ Prize, 2011
The Romanian Writers' Union Prize for Best Prose/2008
The Prize of the Bucharest Writers’ Association/2007 Convorbiri literare (literary magazine) Prize for Prose, 2006
Nomination for The Book of the Year Award 2008, 2016
Diploma for supporting National Archives (ANR), 2016
The Golden Medal of "Schitul Darvari", for Literary Activity, 2008
Excellence in Teaching - National Award (2000)
"Full of humor in some sequences, in other tragic and ferocious, sometimes fantastic and luminous, like a Chagall painting, which is predominant in this wonderful story Zogru is the figure of the terrible loneliness in which lies the human spirit " (Pedro Gandolfo, El Mercurio, August 19, 2018)
"The Phantom is the narrative catalyst that makes secret forces manifest, especially those of a sexual nature, being also the most visible, single faith, dissolved in the last part of the novel." (Markus Bauer, Neue Zürcher Zeitung )
"In my opinion, the confidence, the artistry of portrayal, the exact and original description of the environment, the quest for a subtle epic crescendo, the illusion of stagnation make Doina Ruști a first class prose writer in current literature." ( Nicolae Breban, when granting the Award of Romanian Academy, 2011)
"Extraordinarias cualidades litterarias." (Antonio J. Hbero, La Opinion, 3 01 2015)
"An ironic and seductive story." (Giuseppe Ortolano - The Friday of the Republic , March 23, 2012, nr 1253)
"Amazing is the fire of a row of stunts of pungent and fulminating expressions that the author devises to describe situations and moods of her protagonist." (Alessandra Iadicicco. La Stampa , no 1815, May 12, 2012)
"Stupefacente è il fuocco di fila di trovate di espressioni pungenti e fulminanti que l'autrice escogita per descrivere situazioni e stati d'animo della sua protagonista." (Alessandra Iadicicco. La Stampa, nr 1815, 12 mai, 2012)
"The talented Romanian writer Doina Rusti, who published Lisoanca, the story of an eleven-year-old who infects an entire village with syphilis and makes victims even among her peers, is making a fool of herself, saving herself as an imaginary creature from another world . The book is also inspired by the great "health" novels, such as The Plague of Camus, where crime takes root more easily in a context of widespread disease. These are certainly the models. " (Gianluca Veneziani, Libero , May 18, 2013)
"Fa il verso ai noir fantastici la brava scrittrice rumena Doina Rusti, che ha dato alle stampe Lisoanca , storia di un’undicenne checontagia con la sua sifilide un intero villaggio, mietendo vittime anchetra le coetanee, salvopoirivelarsi una creatura immaginaria venuta da un altro mondo. Il libro si ispira anche ai grandi romanzi «sanitari», come La peste di Camus, dove il crimine attecchisce più facilmente in un contesto di malattia diffusa. questi sono certamente i modelli." (Gianluca Veneziani, Libero, 18 05, 2013)
"With her shocking book about violence against children, Doina Ruști is making a name for herself with us too. The book gets under your skin and is heavy fare. The sophisticated style contrasts with the brutal plot." (Martina Freier, ekz)
"Even the smallest detail of the novel is veridical" (Magyar Nemzet, December 31, 2015)
"A very admirable story, by the way, very well told. Highly recommended." (Miguel Baquero, The storm in a glass , December 16, 2014)
Mâța Vinerii - a stylistic jubilation, a vital literature, such as Suskind's Perfume to a point, and Evgheni Vodolazkin's Laur, from another point on. (Dan C. Mihăilescu)
The Ghost in the Mill is an imaginative novel, in line with autobiographical fiction, in which magic realism and daily realism intertwine. [...] This mill, which is an axis mundi, the center, the hearth and the obsession of the village, where the character has no clue if he has met the angel or the devil, this mill is the place where a murder occurs, as at the dawn of all worlds: a certain Max, an epileptic, is killed by mistake [...] and everybody is obliged to keep silent, thus becoming accomplices in the murder. We have all been accomplices in what has defined and punished us. This is the parable of communism. A novel with substance, a sinewy prose which, I repeat, equals a part or several parts of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Orbitor”. Dan C. Mihailescu, The man who brings the book, ProTV
"Mit ihrem erschütternden Buch über Gewalt an Kindern macht sie sich auch bei uns einen Namen. Das Buch geht unter die Haut und ist eine schwere Kost. Der anspruchsvolle Stil steht im Gegensatz zu der brutaen Handlung." (Martina Freier, ekz)
"even the smallest detail of the novel is veridical" (Magyar Nemzet, 31 decembrie 2015
"Una historia muy admirable, por cierto, muy bien narrada. Muy recomendable." (Miguel Baquero, La tormenta en un vaso, 16 12. 2014)
Shelf Media Group, Los Angeles,
Istoriile orașului, TVR, 2024
For recent media coverage, interviews, and international features, see the News & Press
For critical essays, book reviews, and scholarly studies on her work, visit Critical Reception
accesat în 2025.
Doina Ruști, author'photo
Wikipedia (EN): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doina_Ru%C8%99ti
Wikipedia (RO): https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doina_Ru%C8%99ti
VIAF: https://viaf.org/viaf/19221861
ISNI: https://isni.org/isni/0000000109584995
Library of Congress (LCCN): https://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/no00027741
Clouds drifted above the Dâmbovița, and in the distance the Bozărie was stirring. Leun opened the window. From the river’s mud rose to his nostrils the smell of the city, and from among the elder bushes small mouths called him by name.
There are people ready to enter life early, for whom school is a reckless waste of time. Schools ought to turn into clubs, serving strictly as spaces for socialization.
If you believe me, I can still taste betrayal the same way now — like an evening breath in which the scent of coffee mingles with the metallic rustle of an arnaut’s uniform.
On an August day in the year 1481, the ghost vanished as it had come, closing itself inside a green bud, soon lost among the other souls that keep the world alive. WIKIQUOTE
I felt alone, and the strange thing was that I longed most for Platanos, whom I had thought I would discover quickly, given how tall he was. And then I remembered the library, the Striped Notebook, and his father, the bearded librarian. Only then did I realize I did not even know his name. Whom was I supposed to ask? Still, I set off toward the library. Perhaps they had another position as a doorman for me. I asked left and right how I might get there. Few had heard of the library, and it took me some time to find it: a gigantic building that seemed made of glass, obviously without a roof. The books were protected, in special rooms, beneath tarpaulins or awnings, but the few readers leafed through them in a wide enclosure, stiff and upright, standing beside what had once been a window, now without panes — a torn mouth, a breach besieged by plants.
The word gypsy descends from the name Goiu Lizate Tyaga, the vagabond for whose mad dream his descendants preserved not the slightest trace of respect.
The wolf can be beaten and killed, but no one will take his freedom. He leaves his steps in the snow, and even if bloodstains remain behind him, he goes on dreaming of his endless forest. WIKIQUOTE
Zogru generally disliked the idea of slipping into a man with whom a woman was already in love, for it deprived him even of that small pleasure of being the conqueror himself.
At a table by the window sat Rufă himself. His hair was carefully combed back over his head, and he was dressed in a beige suit, glossy and soft, in total discord with the entire room, crowded with tables covered in crumpled cloths, scorched here and there by cigarettes.
But the most astonishing was the shoe room, a chamber that had once been a shop with a door opening onto the street, where Lionica had gathered all the footwear that had ever passed through the house — especially shoes of every color, arranged on shelves that climbed the walls up to the ceiling. They were the former shoes of her daughters, daughters who still seemed to drift through the room, silhouettes of foam, still tethered to those many pairs: some with heels thin as stilettos, others orthopedic or military in cut; leather shoes that had struck the pavements of cities; velvet boots and ankle boots; Roman sandals with their laces coiled tightly beside them; tall boots or olive galoshes. And besides the pairs lined up on the shelves rose several heaps — beaded slippers, silk ballet flats, patent-leather shoes with buttons and buckles — hundreds of shoes that had made her stop leaving the room altogether. The windows looked out onto the garden, and beside the sill stood the bed, which at first she ignored, wholly absorbed by the footwear. She walked along the shelves, then sat down on the floor. It was a room with old wooden planks, once painted green, now faded in places from years of scrubbing; the bleached patches made it look like a medieval map.
In the history of the Romanians there is only one reason for pride: Bucharest, this city whose name sounds like a pack of dogs.
I was taking small steps along the former Elisabeta Boulevard, from which today not even the name remains, and when I reached the spot near the Carpați restaurant — where there is now a bookshop — Zavaidoc was walking just ahead of me, no more than two meters away. He was smiling and serene, without the sadness that followed Matilda. He was coming toward me warmly, smiling as he once did. WIKIQUOTE
Three is the number of hypocrisy. It destroys the pair. It gives the illusion of perspective.
The desired woman is like opium that sets your mouth on fire, like grief that makes you crumple at sunset.
Evening was falling over Lipscani Street, and for me it was another time. I knew where we were; I had seen thousands of images. “This is Ani’s house,” Matuf said, and I started. It was my house, the one I had not yet built, white, weathered by time. The wig shop had once stood there, across from Nane’s house.
Love is the happiness of being nothing more than a rag rotting in a stranger’s wound. Wikiquote
A sheet of paper written by a human hand is often merely the consequence of events left in shadow. And among the many deeds hidden in the script of our manuscript lies a certain morning in Manda’s life, without which the day of the manuscript would have no value.
The past is like a dog that keeps tearing at your hem without pause, while the present is a mongrel that tricks you into holding it in your arms, making you forget the future — an Afghan hound.
Everything that followed — the salads, the garnishes, and the other companions of the roast — turned into love letters, bouquets of flowers, and serenades through which men send their desires and news of the pulse of their blood. Only Silică was not thinking of women.
In the light of Istanbul, made of moon and stars, the Greek and the Macedonian woman became a single being. They opened their souls, shared their small sins. Together they tasted the sweetness each had been saving for another.
You don’t waste time on a generous man. You don’t linger over drinks. You don’t philosophize about his gesture. Nor do you add him to your list of friends. He remains only a guarantor — the man with the money.
When I heard him mentioning my mother, whom he had started bespattering in something resembling the English language, calling her “a Norwegian whore”, I opened the door and headbutted him without the slightest hesitation. I yelled at the top of my lungs too, so that bitch, Julia, could hear me loud and clear: “I’m an Irish man, you fucking asshole, I’m from Belfast, we would stick some Semtex up your ass" trailer WIKIQUOTE
The name of Bucharest is made of apricot blossoms and the heat of peppers roasted on charcoal.
This name stirred through every nook and cranny, like a breeze, like a rustle, like a collective sigh. In his blood, this name had bred offspring.
Du-te-n pizda mă-tii (Return to the place you were before birth.) is an act of goodwill, a finger raised at the right moment, a warning, help offered in need, even a polite dissociation from someone who has lost his way. It says briefly what a long speech about weaknesses would have said. You made a mistake! That’s that! But you can start again! Let’s pretend it didn’t happen! You are new, unborn, erased from history. Wikiquote
You must caress the roast, speak to the soup, sweets need coaxing like a child, and the cold cuts must be adorned and fussed over like a bride. WIKIQUOTE
Most often grave things happen not because the master does not know the story, but because he has not heard it properly.
Leun, this Leun threatened with becoming a kilipir, hanging from the silk sash of the boyar Dan Doicescu, looked as if he had passed through a typhoon. His hair had slipped damp from beneath his fez, the shawl had fallen over his brow, and his embroidered-sleeved vest looked like a rag.
“If you need to clear the air with these gentlemen, better remove yourself from the car!” Julia’s boyfriend, or whatever he was, didn’t seem like much. I had fought more fearsome men in my life.
Through someone’s dream a cat will pass, dissolved in the vapors of evening, and that dreamer of cats will be my first reader.
Leun was his hidden name, which only Tranca’s serpent tongue had known how to uncover.
Kilipir measured the very scale of failure. It was not merely the dagger hurled into the middle of the forehead, but a red-hot nail, a drill made to crush, over time, with the slowest motion, the flesh of a man condemned to lose, one by one, his house, his name, and his faith.
The hunted man acquires a blind faith in destiny, scattered and transformed over time into a true corpus of geographically rooted superstitions.
Lizoanca at the age of eleven (Lizoanca la 11 ani)
The Ghost in the Mill (Fantoma din moară)
Zogru
The Phanariot Manuscript
The Phanariot Manuscript
The Ghost in the Mill (Fantoma din moară)
The Little Red Man
The Little Red Man
