The Flying Head

Ioan Flora was the award-winning author of twenty books and anthologies, most recently Lecture on the Ostrich-Camel (1995), which won prizes from the Bucharest Writers’ Association and the Writers’ Union of the Republic of Moldova; The Swedish Rabbit (1997), honored with prizes from both the Romanian Writers’ Union and the rival Association of Professional Writers in Romania—ASPRO; Medea and Her War Machines (1999); and Luncheon Under the Grass (2005).
Flora was born in Yugoslavia in the Romanian-speaking region of the Serbian Banat between the Danube River and the border with Romania. He attended the Romanian school in Vârșeț, graduated from the University of Bucharest in 1973, and began publishing books of poetry with Waltzes (1970) and Ivy (1975). Other titles include Poetic Records (1977), The Physical World (1977), Work Therapy (1981), The State of Fact (1984), A Young Owl on its Deathbed (1988), Assassin Memory (1989), and Violet Soles (1990). In 1993, after having been an editor for sixteen years, he moved to Bucharest, where he worked for the Museum of Romanian Literature and the Romanian Writers’ Union.
Ioan Flora died unexpectedly at the age of fifty-four in February 2005, only a few days after the publication of his last book of poems.