Love Story author dies


Eric Segal, the American author of the top-selling romance Love Story, has died in London aged 72, a family friend told Reuters. The writer, born in New York, was buried at a Jewish cemetery in north London on Tuesday. He died of a heart attack on Sunday, local media reported. He had suffered from Parkinson’s Disease for many years. Love Story, originally written as a screenplay when Segal was a classics professor at Yale University, became a best-seller around the world after its publication as a novel in 1970. It was turned a Oscar-winning film, starring Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal. Segal, who also taught at Harvard and Princeton, was a screen writer on the Beatles’ 1968 film Yellow Submarine.


TS Eliot prize handed to Cornwall author


Writer Philip Gross has won the 2009 TS Eliot Poetry Prize for his collection The Water Table, it has been announced. The 57-year-old, who was born in Cornwall, will receive a £15,000 cash prize, the largest in British poetry. The Water Table was inspired by the Bristol Channel, drawing out connections with mystery, depth, and the man-made world. Simon Armitage, chair of the prize’s judging panel, praised Gross’s “great clarity and concentration”. Born in Cornwall in 1952, Gross has published numerous books, plays and poems and in 1982 won the National Poetry Competition. In 2004, he was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan. Other shortlisted authors this year included Sinead Morrissey and 1999 prize-winner Hugo Williams. The Prize was first awarded in 1993 to celebrate the Poetry Book Society’s 40th birthday and its founder, TS Eliot, who died in 1965.


Top Asian films to star at Berlin Festival


Asian cinema will bookend the 60th Berlin International Film Festival, with Chinese drama “Apart Together” from Golden Bear winner Wang Quan’an (“Tuya’s Marriage”) opening the event with its world premiere Feb. 11 and “About Her Brother,” the latest from Japanese director, and Berlinale regular Yoji Yamada (“The Twilight Samurai”) closing the festival Feb. 20. “Apart Together” focuses on the reunion of two lovers who were separated when one, a solider, fled from Shanghai to Taiwan in 1949 to escape Mao Tse-tung’s troops. The film stars Lu Yan, Ling Feng, Xu Cai Gen and Mo Xiaoqi. The film will screen in competition, giving Wang Quan’an a chance for a second Golden Bear. “Apart Together” will also screen separately in Berlin’s Culinary Cinema section on Feb. 17.”About Her Brother,” screening out of competition, will mark Yamada’s seventh visit to Berlin. He was last here with the World War II period drama “Kabei: Our Mother,” which premiered in competition in 2008.


‘Sign and Shape’ at ICR


‘Sign and Shape’ – a sculpture exhibition by artist Aurel Contars – opened at the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR) Wednesday night in the presence of the author and of art critic Aurelia Mocanu. Another art critic, Octavian Barbosa, was characterizing the sculptor as ‘an intuitive nature aspiring to a symbolic conceptualization of image’. ‘Content always prevails over shape without taking its place. The shape does not abandon its original figurative information in respect to image, on the contrary, it preserves it in all its beauty, often giving the impression, even the feeling of archeology brought back to life’, the critic was noting. To a fellow artist like Marian Gherasim, ‘Aurel Contars’ current sculpture is impregnated with the feeling of the sacred, asserted with discretion, unostentatiously, interiorised’, the reputed artist recognizing in that ‘a sign of plenary maturity of the artist, capable of saying a lot in a deep manner, by few and essential gestures’. The exhibition will continue until February 3.


Book on Romania to be launched in Rome


‘La Romania nella politica estera italiana. 1915-1965. Luci e ombre di un’amixizia storica/ ‘Romania in the Italian foreign policy. 1915-1965. Lights and shadows of a historic friendship’, by Giuliano Caroli, will be released at the Conference Hall of Accademia di Romania in Rome, Friday night. With this event, Acacdemia di Romania wants to mark the 130th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Romania and Italy. The Press Office of the institution indicates some of the themes that are addressed by the new volume: the liberal Italy and ‘Greater Romania’ (1919-1922), ‘Romania in Mussolini’s Balkan policy of the 1920s’, the treaty with General Averescu (1922-1928), the incompletion of the Italian-Romanian treaty between the Briand-Kellogg Pact and the Danubian Pact (1929-1935), crises and attempted rapprochements between Rome and Bucharest (1935-1936), the failed agreement between Rome and Bucharest (1936-1939), Italy and the end of ‘Greater Romania’ (from Antonescu’s visit to Rome to Hitler’s involvement in 1940-1942, Romanian and Italian attempts at exiting WWII and their respective integration into blocs (1942-1946), Italy and Romania during the Cold War (1947-1955) and the relaxation of political, economic and cultural relations between Bucharest and Rome in 1955-1965.


A month of flamenco


The public interested in the Spanish culture will have a flamenco festival in Bucharest, in February, bringing them films directed by Carlos Suara and cultural events organised by the Spanish Embassy to Romania. Spanish Ambassador Estanislao de Grandes Pascual held a press conference on Tuesday to present the principal events to be organized by his diplomatic mission to mark the Spanish EU rotating presidency. The flamenco festival organized in co-operation with the Cervantes Institute will last a month and will include various forms of flamenco – dance, songs, guitar and jazz.

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