duration: 1h
recommended age: general audience
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ȘI DIALOG | PAULA ERIZANU IN DIALOGUE WITH ALEX TOCILESCU
About
Two people are sitting on beanbags under a sunshade. One of them is Alex Tocilescu, who thinks of himself as a playwright. The other one isn’t Alex Tocilescu. They’re drinking beer or water or whatever they feel like. They’re talking about theater, film, culture, 2 Mai, the Black Sea, life, death, or whatever else comes to mind. The audience sits on beanbags and listens with genuine interest. After about an hour, the discussion ends. People leave to go for a swim, or to eat, or to sleep, or to perform in a play. Maybe they’ve left with a thought from the whole discussion, or maybe not. Ideally, though, they would have.
Paula Erizanu (b. 1992) is a writer and journalist. She studied history and literature at New College of the Humanities in London, then journalism at City University London. She wrote about the 2009 protests in the Republic of Moldova in This Is My First Revolution. Steal It from Me (Cartier, 2011, trilingual edition). The book received significant media attention in Chișinău and was awarded the Debut Prize of the Writers’ Union of Moldova and the Prize for the Most Popular Book from the “Ion Creangă” National Library; it was also nominated for the Observator cultural Awards in the debut category. It received the international UNESCO prize for the most beautiful book production of 2011 at the Leipzig Book Fair. Her poetry collection Take Care of Yourself followed in 2016, published by Charmides. Since 2019, Paula Erizanu has coordinated, together with Alina Purcaru, the anthology A Century of Romanian Poetry Written by Women, published by Cartier in three volumes. Also at Cartier, in 2021, she published the historical novel The Forests Are Burning, written with the support of a Central European Initiative fellowship. The book was nominated for the Sofia Nădejde Awards and for the Festival du Premier Roman in Chambéry, France. She has written for publications including BBC World Service, The Guardian, London Review of Books, Libertatea, Observator cultural, Dilema veche, Scena9, and others. In 2019, she was nominated for Culture Journalist of the Year at the British Words by Women awards. She is currently the culture editor of the London-based online magazine The Calvert Journal.
Alex Tocilescu has been coming to 2 Mai since 1978, when he was one year old, and he always stays with Aunt Mița, in the middle room. He is also a writer, playwright, and advertising executive.
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