Matéi Visniec (b. 1956) is a multi-award-winning Romanian-born novelist, playwright, poet, and journalist. He has been based in Paris since 1987, where he works as a journalist for Radio France Internationale.
He writes his dramas in French and his fiction and poetry in Romanian, and his work is published, among others, by Actes Sud-Papiers, L'Harmattan, Lansman, Cartea Românească, Humanitas and Polirom. Visniec's plays are among the most frequently performed at the Avignon OFF festival and he has a growing international profile, with productions taking place across four continents. In his native Romania, Visniec has achieved quasi-canonical status since the fall of communism (his work was banned prior to 1989); most theatres stage his work on an ongoing basis (the Timişoara National Theatre programmed a festival exclusively dedicated to his work, and the recently founded Suceava Theatre was named Matei Visniec Theatre); and his literary output has been the subject of intense critical scrutiny. Matéi Visniec is the recipient of the Drama Award of the Romanian Union of Writers (2002, 1999); the Drama Award of the Academy of Romania (1998); the Award of The French Society of Authors and Composers (1994) and multiple awards at the Avignon OFF Festival. The following Visniec works are available in English: the drama anthology How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients and Other Plays, edited by Jozefina Komporaly (Seagull Books, 2015); the plays "The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War" in Balkan Plots, edited by Cheryl Robson (Aurora Metro Books, 2002), and "Horses at the Window" in Playwrights before the Fall, edited by Daniel Gerould (Martin E. Segal Center Publications, 2009); and the novel Mr. K Released, translated by Jozefina Komporaly (Seagull Books, 2020—shortlisted for the 2021 EBRD Literature Prize). The newly published collection Plays from Romania,edited and translated by Jozefina Komporaly (Bloomsbury, 2021), includes two Visniec plays: "The Spectator Sentenced to Death" and "The Man who Had His Inner Evil Removed."
