Andreea Iulia Scridon is a Romanian-American poet.
She sees poetry as synthetic germination of complex emotional processes, but also as what the madding crowd of the internet would call “a cope”. Ranging from flamboyant to introspective, her poems have been called “suspiciously adorable”.
She has published several books: the full-length collection A Romanian Poem (MadHat Press),the the chapbooks Calendars (Broken Sleep Books), and Across The Nile-Green Sky (Greying Ghost Press).
For Romanian readers, she has a self-translated anthology, Hotare (Editura universitară).
Described as a free thinker who marches to the beat of her own drum (as she once overheard her high school history teacher telling her parents), Scridon is concerned with and by the socio-psychological mechanisms of contemporary life, but also increasingly with the pulsating force of the human spirit’s eternal yearning for the divine. She is convinced that we are living a crucial turning point and that it is our duty both to document this zeitgeist and treat it with wariness at the same time.
She studied Comparative Literature at King’s College London and Creative Writing at St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she completed a magical realist novel on alchemy, which currently needs the maternal care of a literary agent. At present, she is putting the final touches on a manuscript that is far more realistic but no less magical.
Fascinated and infuriated by cultural politics, her sustained interest in minor literatures led her towards a doctoral study on the topic, which she is in the process of completing. She grew up in a Transylvanian family full of elderly yet strongly contoured personalities, who show up in her imaginary space often. She has lived in many places and travels a lot.
As a literary translator, Scridon has translated two poetry books – Somewhere a blind child by Ion Cristofor (Naked Eye Publishing) and Night With a Pocketful of Stones (Broken Sleep Books) with her co-translator Adam J. Sorkin. A collection of short stories by Ion D. Sîrbu, an important representative of subversive writing under the communist regime, is forthcoming with ABPress. She has worked extensively with the Romanian Cultural Institutes in London and New York, Romania’s Ministry of Culture, and is also available for film and documentary subtitling.
Scridon is poetry editor at E Ratio Poetry Journal and was assistant fiction editor at Asymptote Journal for several years. Her work has been published in World Literature Today, Oxford Review of Books, Oxford Poetry, Wild Court, and the London Magazine, among other journals. She was the winner of the University of Oxford’s 2020 STAAR Editorial Prize and was shortlisted for the 2019 Oxford Review of Books Short Fiction Prize.
In 2023, she was awarded First Place at the Neptun Young Writers’ Festival on the Black Sea Coast, and was named Writer of the Month of September at the Romanian Writers’ Gala.
ANDREEA IULIA SCRIDON 