Bucharest, March 6 /Agerpres/ – Bogdan Cretu novel ‘Mai putin decat dragostea/Less Than Love’, put out by Polirom Publishing House, is Romania’s nomination for the 2025 European Union Prize for Literature, the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR) said in a release on Thursday.

The announcement of the winner and the award of the prize, along with two special mentions will take place at a Gala scheduled for May 16 at the Prague International Book Fair.

At the invitation of the European Union Prize for Literature Consortium, the ICR set up in 2025 the national jury tasked with picking the fiction volume that is to represent Romania. Sitting on the nominating jury were Ruxandra Cesereanu – writer, Professor at the Faculty of Letters of the Babes Bolyai University in Cluj, and PEN Club Romania president; Peter Demeny – writer, translator, editor-in-chief of the Matca Literara magazine; and Angelo Mitchievici – literary critic, Professor at the Faculty of Letters of the Ovidius University in Constanta, vice-president of the Writers’ Union of Romania.

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Bogdan Cretu (b. 1978), a Professor at the Faculty of Letters of the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iasi, was between 2013 and 2022 director of the ‘A. Philippide’ Institute of Romanian Philology of the Romanian Academy’s Iasi branch.

He has published eight volumes of literary criticism, numerous studies in academic volumes in the country and abroad, and has edited, curated and prefaced multiple anthologies. His works have earned him several prizes.

Cretu was also editor-in-chief of the Timpul magazine and currently contributes a literary column in the magazine Observator Cultural.

Less Than Love is his third novel, after ‘Cornul inorogului/The Unicorn’s Horn’ (2021) and ‘Nichita. Poetul ca si soldatul/Nichita. The Poet as a Soldier’ (2022).

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The international jury that will decide this year’s EUPL winner is chaired by Danish writer Jens Christian Grondahl and is made up of people of letters and publishing specialists: Anna Jarota (Poland), Barbara Anderlic (Slovenia), Rosa Azevedo (Portugal), Svetlozar Zhelev (Bulgaria), Vera Michalski-Hoffmann (Switzerland), Vilis Kasims (Latvia).

Nominations from thirteen countries participate in the competition for the 2025 European Union Prize for Literature: Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Norway, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Ukraine.

The European Union Prize for Literature is organized by a consortium of associations, including the Federation of European Publishers (FEP) and the Federation of European and International Booksellers (EIBF), with the support of the European Union’s Creative Europe Program.