Gheorghe Sasarman

Born on April 9, 1941, in Bucharest, Romania, Gheorghe Sasarman spent his childhood and attended high-school in Cluj, Transylvania's capital-city. He studied architecture in Bucharest and after graduation was employed as a journalist, authoring articles on architecture and popular science. In 1978 he received his Ph.D. in the theory of architecture with the dissertation Function, Space, Architecture (later published as an essay). Politically constrained to abandon his activity as a media writer, he left Ceausescu's Romania in 1983 and settled in Munich, Germany, where he worked as a computer programmer and analyst. Sasarman made his debut as a writer in 1962, when he won the first prize at a SF short-story contest organized for seven East-European countries. His first book, The Oracle (1969) grouped texts previously published in periodicals. His best-known work, Squaring the Circle (1975), clashed with the communist censorship, which cut out one quarter of its contents; it was also published in France (1994) and Spain (2010). This book has been translated by Ursula K. Le Guin.