Lavinia Braniste

Lavinia Braniște was born in 1983 in Brăila. She studied foreign languages and literatures in Cluj-Napoca and Bucharest and now she lives in Bucharest, where she translates children’s literature and sometimes writes.

She started writing poetry when she was in primary school and grew up listening to her grandfather’s stories, who used to make her cardboard toys and colourful kites which they flew “on the railway”. Together with her grandfather she would crawl under a wire fence and into the nursery garden near the railways, where they would gather grass for the chickens and yellow dandelions
for her mother. With her grandmother, she would pick up thistles to put on the house roof on Whit Sunday, and the next morning they would inspect them to see whose luck had grown the most. “Children’s books fell on me out of the blue after a twenty-year break, during which I changed jobs and rents and learned to live on my own,” Lavinia Branişte confesses. “I write because
I like it. And it took me twenty years to admit to this openly.”

She published Povești cu mine (poems, 2006), Cinci minute pe zi (short stories, 2011), Escapada (short stories, 2014), Rostogol merge acasă (short novel for children, 2016) and Interior zero (novel, 2016).