Gabriela Adamesteanu is considered one of the most outstanding prose writers in contemporary Romanian literature. Her literary debut was in 1971; in 1975 she published her first volume. Her reputation was established by the publication of her mature piece of fiction Dimineata pierduta (Wasted Morning, 1983). Her career later changed directions when Adamesteanu turned to journalism in 1990, after the fall of communism.

Adamesteanu was born on 2 April 1942 in Tîrgu-Ocna, a small Moldavian town in eastern Romania. Her intellectual parents and her youth during the first hard decades of communist rule shaped her future writings, many of which consist of veiled biographical elements. Her mother, Elena (neé Predescu) Adamesteanu, came from a family of shopkeepers in Bucharest and was first a home economics teacher, but because of the communists' interdiction of her profession, she became a kindergarten teacher. She met her future husband, Mircea Adamesteanu, in 1938 in Kishinev, the...