Poet, writer, literary critic and publicist. He is regarded as one of Romania's highest international-profile writers. Famous for his precise prose, his work portrays the entropy in contemporary European life and the longing for empathy in the heart of the human condition. He is the author of the novels Why we love women (2004), Solenoid (2015) and The left wing (1996), among other works.

Notable awards he has received in Romania and other countries include the Berlin International Prize for Literature in 2012, the Gregor von Rezzori Prize in 2016, the Thomas Mann Prize for Literature in 2018 and the Formentor Literature Prize in 2018.