Andra Rotaru

Andra Rotaru works at the interface between the arts and has been involved in several collaborative projects in Romania and abroad. She has been invited to give readings, panels and presentations in various places in Europe and in North and South America. She has published the poetry collections Intr-un pat, sub cearşaful alb [In a bed, under the white sheet] (2005), Ținuturile sudului [The southern regions] (2010), Lemur (2012) and Tribar (2018). She was awarded the ‘Young Poet of the Year’ prize for Lemur. The debut volume was translated into Spanish (En una cama bajo la sábana blanca, Bassarai, 2008), Lemur was published in 2018 in the American translation by Florin Bican at Action Books, Tribar was also published in 2022 in the American translation by Anca Roncea at Saturnalia Books.

Jury statement

Andra Rotaru, born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1980, is a language dancer between disciplines. Her poetic texts confront spoken language with gestural language, focus on the body and open up unusual spaces. They transcend borders in many respects and draw on important texts from world and specialised literature. In some passages, they sound like poetic instructions for performance. In interdisciplinary collaborations, Rotaru positions her poetry at the interface of dance, film, photography, art, music and experimentation. Behind her concept of the body, an impressive way of working can be surmised, which is influenced by the archaic-mythical as well as the scientific and technoid-fantastic. This timeless context of reflection gives rise to critical-phenomenological observations of the human being.

In addition to her own literary work, which includes four highly acclaimed volumes of poetry that have been translated into 20 languages and presented on international stages, Andra Rotaru is also committed to the international networking of literary scenes and has founded the multimedia and multilingual magazine Crevice. She organises literary events and cultural projects and also works as a cultural journalist.

In the submitted project entitled CONTENT NOT FOUND, the author intends to explore the hidden meanings of language with the help of intertextual references to texts from the Shadow Romantic period and the Wiener Gruppe, collages of everyday impressions from Graz and fragments of language and other experimental techniques in dealing with language and choreography (Robert Laban).