photo © nadejda roscovanu

Paula Erizanu [Moldova]

Paula Erizanu was born in 1992 in Chisinau, Moldova. After completing her Bachelor’s degree in History with English and History of Art at the New College of the Humanities in London and her Master’s in Magazine Journalism at City University London, she worked as a journalist in London. Specialising in politics and culture in eastern Europe, she was the Culture Editor of The Calvert Journal between 2019-2022. Her work has also appeared in The Guardian, BBC, Financial Times, London Review of Books, CNN, Aeon, Dazed, The Architectural Review and other publications. In 2019, she was nominated for the Words by Women award as UK’s culture journalist of the year. Her first book, This is my first revolution. Steal It (2010, trilingual edition) is a non-fiction account of the Moldova mass protests in April 2009, which received several prizes including UNESCO’s “World’s Most Beautiful Production” at Leipzig and the National Library in Moldova. She also published a a poetry collection, Take Care (2015), and has coordinated the three-part anthology A Century of Romanian Poetry Written by Women (2019, 2020), together with Alina Purcaru.Her debut novel, The Woods Are Burning, a fictionalised historical account of the lives of early Soviet feminists Alexandra Kollontai and Inessa Armand, was published in Romanian in 2021. The book won Erizanu the Young Writer of the Year 2021 title at Bucharest’s Young Writers Gala. It was also shortlisted for the Sofia Nădejde Prize in Romania and Festival du Premier Roman in Chambery, France. Erizanu lives between Chrisinau, Bucharest and London.