Țîbuleac Tatiana
Main achievement
Writer. Her work *The Glass Garden* was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature in 2019.
About
Tatiana Țîbuleac was born in Chișinău in 1978 and comes from a family with a journalistic tradition – her father was a journalist, and her mother was a proofreader for a newspaper. She studied journalism and worked for over ten years in print media and at Pro TV Chișinău, where she distinguished herself as a reporter through her coverage of Moldovan migration. In 2008, she settled in Paris, where she initially continued to work in various fields, including with UNICEF, activities that broadened her cultural and human horizons. Her experience as a journalist, marked by encounters with real and painful stories, left its mark on her literary style, characterized by acuity and realism. Tatiana Țîbuleac's editorial debut occurred with the collection of novellas "Modern Fables" (2014), which began as an informal writing exercise on social media, on Montorgueil Street in Paris. Her first novel, "The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes" (2017), won several prestigious awards, including the Moldovan Writers' Union Award and the Observator Cultural magazine award from Bucharest, and has been translated into over five languages. Her second novel, "The Glass Garden" (2018), established her internationally, winning the European Union Prize for Literature in 2019 – a distinction that recognized her as a Romanian author, even though the writer has never lived in Romania. Her works, translated into twenty languages, explore the destinies of European migrants, intrafamilial conflicts, and identity complexities, and the volumes published by Éditions des Syrtes in France have earned her recognition from French-speaking critics. Living in Paris for over fifteen years, Tatiana Țîbuleac remains deeply connected to the Republic of Moldova, the country that fuels the memory and literary themes of her work. She deliberately chooses to write exclusively in Romanian, although she also speaks other languages – English, French, and Russian – passing on its language to her children, who were born in France. In 2025, she launched the new novel "Când ești fericit, lovește primul" (Cartier), which tells the experiences of Moldovans who emigrated in the 1990s and their adaptation in their adopted country. Tatiana Țîbuleac establishes herself as a distinct voice in contemporary literature, combining journalistic rigor with artistic sensitivity, and her presence in the Franco-European cultural space illustrates the power of language and memory to connect generations and cultures.
