The novel Zogru by Doina Ruști will be featured at the Festival du Livre de Paris, during an event dedicated to contemporary Romanian literature. The meeting will take place on April 22, at 6:30 PM, at the Romanian stand (B33), within the exhibition space Le Grand Palais Éphémère, located in Place Joffre, 75007 Paris.
The event will feature a conversation about the novel Zogru, one of the most distinctive works of the Romanian novelist, a book that has become a landmark of contemporary fantastical prose inspired by the history of Bucharest.
Alongside the author, the event will include Florica Courriol, translator of the French edition of the novel, and Iulia Badea-Guéritée, journalist and moderator of the discussion. The meeting will conclude with a book-signing session, offering readers the opportunity to meet the author and explore the literary world behind the novel.
First published in Romania, Zogru is considered one of the emblematic titles of Doina Ruști’s fiction. The novel proposes an original narrative construction in which the history of Bucharest is crossed by a mysterious entity—Zogru—a wandering spirit that changes hosts and lives through the lives of different people.
Through this unusual perspective, the novel moves across several historical periods, from the Phanariot era to modern times, transforming individual biographies into a wide fresco of collective memory. The character Zogru becomes both witness and catalyst of history, symbolizing an identity that continuously shifts and reinvents itself.
Critics have noted since its publication the novel’s inventive structure, which combines fantastic elements, realism, and reflection on identity. By blending these narrative registers, Zogru enters a broader literary tradition that uses supernatural motifs to explore memory, history, and the hidden layers of human experience.
At the same time, the novel offers a vision of Bucharest as a mythic space, a city where past events, legends, and personal destinies intersect.
The French edition of Zogru was published in 2022 by Les Éditions du Typhon in Marseille, in the collection Les Hallucinés, translated by Florica Courriol.
The publication was supported by the Fondation Jan Michalski, an institution that supports international literary projects and translations.
Through this translation, Zogru entered the Francophone literary circuit, where contemporary Romanian literature has increasingly gained attention. Its presence at the Festival du Livre de Paris continues this process of bringing Romanian literature to an international readership.
The novel has also been recently republished in Romania in a new edition by Editura Litera, confirming the sustained interest in the book.
Over time, Zogru has been read both as a fantastic novel and as a reflection on identity and the ways in which history continues to shape personal destinies.
The presence of Zogru at the Festival du Livre de Paris forms part of a broader program dedicated to promoting contemporary Romanian literature in the Francophone world. The festival is one of Europe’s major publishing events, bringing together writers, publishers, and readers from many countries.
In this context, Doina Ruști’s participation highlights an important direction in Romanian fiction: literature that intertwines history, memory, and the fantastic imagination.
The participation of Zogru at the Festival du Livre de Paris has been reported by numerous Romanian media outlets and cultural platforms, including:
Ziare Live
Doina Ruști is one of the leading voices of contemporary Romanian fiction. She has published numerous novels and short-story collections, many of them translated into several languages.
Her work is known for blending history, magical realism, and Balkan imagination, creating narrative worlds in which historical documents, legends, and fiction intertwine.
Novels such as Zogru, The Book of Perilous Dishes (Mâța Vinerii), and The Phanariot Manuscript have contributed to shaping a distinctive literary style in which the past becomes a living substance of storytelling.
Her participation in the Festival du Livre de Paris confirms the growing international interest in this type of literature, where local history is transformed into stories with universal resonance.
