Eerie, profound, archaic – a breathtakingly atmospheric image of post-Communist Romania.

DIE NIGHT STERBEN
(Those Who Never Die)
by Dana Grigorcea
Penguin Germany, March 2021

Transylvania. After studying art in Paris, a young Bucharest artist returns to her home in the Romanian Carpathians, to a world that has become alien to her. When a defiled body is found upon the grave of Vlad the Impaler, better known as Dracula, she decides to tell the town’s story and eventually comes to realize that it is not about causes and effects but about one thing only: Fate. Dana Grigorcea paints an image of a society which still to this day appears to be caught in a kind of limbo. She leads her readers into the heart of a horror which can only be conjured in one’s own imagination, and breaks the silence between the generations.

Dana Grigorcea, born in 1979 in Bucharest, studied German and Dutch litera-ture in Bucharest and theatre and film directing as well as quality jour-nalism in Krems, Austria. She worked as journalist and has been living in Zurich as freelancing writer since 2013. Her novels and stories won multiple awards, among them the 3sat Prize of the Ingeborg Bachmann awards and have been translated into numerous languages.