Sorana Gurian

Sorana Gurian (born Sara Gurfinchel; October 18, 1913 – June 10, 1956) was a Romanian writer, journalist, and translator who wrote both in Romanian and in French.

Born in the Russian Empire, in Comrat, Bessarabia, she lost both of her parents while still young. After that, she and her two younger sisters, Lia and Isabela, were taken care of by their stepmother. She went to high school in Bender, passing her Baccalauréat exam in 1931, and then studied at the Letters Department of Chernivtsi University and Iași University without graduating.

She became a member of Eugen Lovinescu's Sburătorul literary circle in 1937, after returning from Berck, France, where she had gone for balneotherapeutical treatment of her extrapulmonary tuberculosis. While in France, it seems, she also studied at the Sorbonne. When she returned to Romania, she started publishing articles, first in the "Lumea" magazine in Iași, which were clearly democratic, antinationalist, antifascist and antirevisionist in style. Under the influence of Vladimir Ghika, she had by then converted from Judaism to Catholicism.

After Romania changed sides on August 23, 1944, thanks to the fact that she knew Communists from her time in the underground opposition, she was named director of Universul. In the first three years after the war, she collaborated with many leftist publications, wrote propagandistic texts and, as she knew Russian, worked as an interpreter for the Allied Commission.

Works Zilele nu se întorc niciodată, Bucharest, 1945 Întâmplări dintre amurg şi noapte, Bucharest, 1946 Les mailles du filet. Mon journal de Roumanie, Paris, 1950 Les jours ne reviennent jamais, Paris, 1952 Les amours impitoyables, Paris, 1953 Recit d'un combat, Paris, 1956 Ochiurile reţelei. Jurnalul meu din Romania, Bucharest, 2002

Translations She translated works by Alexander Griboyedov, J. B. Priestley, Hans Prager, Franz Ludwig Neher, etc.

Works featuring Gurian Virginia's Sisters: An Anthology of Women's Writing, Aurora Metro Books, 2023,