Press Release

The Book — At a Glance

Synopsis

Romania is older, quieter, and stranger than the postcards suggest. In twenty patient notes, Eleodor Sotropa walks readers through painted monasteries and Bucharest mornings, through Saxon rooflines and the Danube Delta, through Brâncuși’s brass column at the angle the late light meant. To Romania, with Love does not try to explain the country. It does what notes do: it pays attention, one bowl of soup, one wooden gate, one kitchen-table conversation at a time.

The book is structured as twenty illustrated chapters, each opening with an italic Notes on… passage that establishes the sensory ground of what follows. Place chapters alternate with food, business, art, and institutional chapters, by design — Bucharest is followed by mititei, the country’s iconic grilled meat; the painted monasteries of Voroneț are followed by ciorbă rădăuțeană, the soup of 1979 Bucovina kitchens; Brâncuși’s Endless Column in Târgu Jiu is followed by UiPath, the Floreasca apartment-block startup that quietly became one of Europe’s most valuable tech companies.

The book braids three registers throughout. The postcard register — painted monasteries, sunset Carpathians, the Delta at dawn. The post-communist register — NATO accession in 2004, EU accession in 2007, the Floreasca glass and the bakery chain that wakes the country at six in the morning. And the everyday register — the bowl of soup at the next table, the wooden gate in front of the house your friend’s grandmother lived in, the one-sentence joke a stranger makes when the bus is late. The everyday register, Sotropa argues, is the one the country actually lives in, and the one hardest to write because it does not announce itself.

What unifies the chapters is not argument but attention. The Preface, “Why Notes Are Better Than Conclusions,” sets the terms. The Epilogue, “A Word of Thanks,” closes on a triple beat that mirrors the manuscript’s recurring cadence: The writing closes here. The carrying continues. It still does.

By the end, a place the reader may never visit will have made a small, permanent room for itself in the reader’s imagination — and the reader will understand why some who left, never quite did.

The Author

One-line bio

Eleodor Sotropa was born in Romania. He has lived in the United States for two decades. He writes on weekends.

Short bio (50 words)

Eleodor Sotropa was born in Romania and lives in Cincinnati, where he works as an Executive Leader in IT at Procter & Gamble. He writes on weekends. To Romania, with Love is his first book, the result of four decades of attention to a country he left and never quite left.

Medium bio (150 words)

Eleodor Sotropa was born in Romania and has lived in the United States since the late 1990s. He works as a Executive Leader in IT at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, where he leads digital and data initiatives across global businesses.

He writes on weekends. To Romania, with Love is his first book, the result of four decades of attention to a country he left and never quite left. The Bucovina chapters draw on family memory carried by his mother Elisabeta, his sister Angela, and his great-grandfather Calistrat Șotropa, a historian whose work informs the painted-monastery passages.

He lives in Cincinnati with his family. He is at work on a second book.

Long bio (300 words)

Eleodor Sotropa was born in Romania in the late 1970s. He grew up in a household where reading was the central evening activity — his mother, Elisabeta, taught history in a small town and read aloud from Eminescu in the evenings. His older sister, Angela, married at Putna monastery in early-1980s Bucovina and showed her younger brother that travel was a way of sharpening attention rather than a way of leaving. His aunt, Aurora Șotropa, was a librarian in Bucharest whose Saturday afternoons of Bergman and Lubitsch films, in a small apartment near the Cișmigiu gardens, were — in the 1980s — a cultural register the country outside her door did not yet permit.

He emigrated to Canada and then US in the late 1990s. Since then he has lived in Cincinnati, where he is a Technical Leader in IT at Procter & Gamble, leading digital and data initiatives across global businesses.

He has written about Romania, on and off, for twenty years — in notebooks, in long emails, in unpublished drafts. To Romania, with Love is his first book. The Bucovina chapters in particular draw on the work of his great-grandfather, Calistrat Șotropa, a historian of the Bukovinian Romanian peoples whose archive informs the painted-monastery passages.

The book took roughly a decade to write — most of it on weekends — and went through four editorial passes, including a critique-and-revise cycle on every chapter.

He lives in Cincinnati with his family. He returns to Romania most summers. He is at work on a second book, working title The Carrying, on the small museums of Eastern Europe.

Story Angles for Editors

Editors working on the following beats may find specific angles into this book.

For literary travel editors

(LitHub, AFAR, Outside, World Literature Today)

Slow travel writing is having a quiet revival. To Romania, with Love is a book-length argument for the watch-book tradition in an era of fast culture. The author cites Fermor, West, and Thubron explicitly. Romania is a country the English-language literary travel canon has barely touched.

For Eastern European / cultural editors

(World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, Calvert Journal, NYRB)

Romania at 20 — two decades into NATO, nineteen years into the EU, fifteen years past the great Romanian emigration wave. The book is one of the first English-language literary works to take the country’s post-post-communist period as serious subject matter, including the rise of UiPath and the return of Țiriac’s collection.

For Romanian-American press

(Romanian Times, Romanian Tribune, Romanian Journal NY)

A diaspora writer in Cincinnati publishes a love letter to Romania that names its family carriers directly and reads in the voice of the country’s own kitchen tables. The book is unusual within diaspora literature for refusing nostalgia and instead writing the country as it is now.

For business and technology editors

(Wired, Fast Company, Bloomberg, Romanian-language Hotnews)

The author is a senior technologist at one of the world’s largest consumer-goods companies. The book includes a substantial chapter on UiPath — the Bucharest startup that became one of Europe’s most valuable software companies — written by someone who understands both the technology and the Floreasca neighborhood. The author/subject overlap is rare.

For arts editors

(NYRB, ARTnews, Apollo)

Chapter 17 is a reading of Brâncuși’s Endless Column in Târgu Jiu — the 96-foot brass-clad steel column the sculptor erected in 1937 as part of the World War I memorial ensemble. The chapter reads the column at the specific angle of late-afternoon light in October, the angle Brâncuși specified in his correspondence. The book’s title itself borrows from a 1947 letter Brâncuși wrote to a Romanian friend.

For food editors

(Eater, Saveur, Lucky Peach successors)

Three chapters are food chapters — mititei (the public meat), ciorbă rădăuțeană (the 1979 Bucovinian soup), and Luca Covrigi (the Romanian morning-bread chain). The book takes Romanian food seriously as cultural carrier rather than as ornament.

Sample Interview Questions

The author is comfortable with conversational interviews of 30 to 60 minutes, in English or Romanian. The following questions have been tested and produce strong, on-record answers.

1. The book opens with a Preface called Why Notes Are Better Than Conclusions. What did you write against — what kind of book did you not want to write?
2. You write that “a country is not a postcard. It is what you notice when you stop trying to take one.” What’s the difference between observation and attention, in your view?

3. Romania doesn’t sit in heavy rotation on the world’s literary map. Why? And does that change how a writer approaches it?
4. You write about UiPath, Țiriac, Dedeman — the country’s contemporary economy. Most travel writing about Eastern Europe stays in 1989. Why move forward?
5. The Bucovina chapters are some of the most personal in the book. What does it mean to write about a region your great-grandfather wrote about a hundred years ago?

6. The book has 20 chapters, each opening with an italic Notes on… passage. Where did that structure come from?
7. There are no em dashes in this book. That’s unusual. Why?
8. You name your family directly — Elisabeta, Angela, Aurora, Calistrat. Why name them rather than fictionalize or generalize?

9. You work full-time in IT at Procter & Gamble. The book is 100,000 words of literary prose. How do those two registers coexist in one mind?
10. You’re already collecting reader suggestions for a second edition. What are you hoping readers will tell you?

11. The Epilogue ends with three lines: The writing closes here. The carrying continues. It still does. What is being carried?
12. If a reader of this conversation never opens the book — what one thing would you want them to take from this interview?

Author Talking Points

The author can speak with depth and specificity to the following themes.

• 01
  Slow travel writing in the age of fast culture
  The watch-book tradition (Fermor, Thubron, West, Magris) as a quiet protest against the postcard. Why long sentences and unhurried observation are an ethical position, not just a stylistic one.
• 02
  Romania at twenty
  The country two decades after NATO, nineteen years after the EU, fifteen years past the great emigration wave. What changed, what did not, what English-language readers have missed.
• 03
  Family memory as research method
  The mother as history teacher. The sister as travel companion. The aunt as cultural smuggler. The great-grandfather as archival presence. How a family becomes the carrier of a country.
• 04
  The three registers
  Postcard, post-communist, everyday. The argument that the everyday register is where countries actually live, and the hardest one for travel writing to honor.
• 05
  Brâncuși’s letter and the with-love tradition
  The book’s title borrows from a 1947 letter Brâncuși wrote to a Romanian friend. The author can speak about the Endless Column, the geometry of the 15 rhomboids, and what late-October light does to brass.
• 06
  Romanian food as cultural carrier
  Mititei as the public meat. Ciorbă rădăuțeană as the soup of 1979 kitchens. Luca Covrigi as the morning-bread chain that wakes a country.
• 07
  The technologist who writes
  Working full-time in IT at one of the world’s largest consumer-goods companies, while writing literary prose on weekends. What the two registers teach each other.
• 08
  The painted monasteries of Bucovina
  Voroneț, Sucevița, Moldovița, Humor. The blue that is not a colour but a position. The frescoes as theology, history, resistance, and art.
• 09
  The post-1989 entrepreneurs
  Dedeman, Țiriac, UiPath. Three Romanian success stories, each treated in its own chapter.
• 10
  Why Romania is underwritten in English
  Romanian literature has been historically translated thinly into English. Travel writing on the country has been thinner still. The author has views on why, and on what is changing.

Selected Excerpts

The following passages are cleared for quotation and reprint with attribution. For longer excerpts (over 500 words), please contact the author directly.

Currently soliciting endorsements from

• A senior figure in Romanian-American letters
• A literary travel writer in the Fermor/Thubron lineage
• A Romanian-language writer or critic at a major Bucharest publication
• An academic in Romanian or Eastern European Studies

Visual Assets

The following high-resolution assets are available for editorial use. All assets are cleared for press use with attribution.

Download all assets: eleodor.com/book/press

Booking and Contact

Author availability

Eleodor Sotropa is based in Cincinnati, Ohio and is available for the following throughout 2026 and into 2027:

• Author readings at bookstores, libraries, cultural centers, and consulates (60-minute format: reading, conversation with moderator, audience Q&A, signing).
• Podcast and radio interviews, in English or Romanian, in person in Cincinnati or remotely.
• Print and online interviews, written exchanges, profile pieces.
• University events at programs in Romanian Studies, Eastern European Studies, Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Comparative Literature.
• Romanian Cultural Institute, embassy, and consulate events across the United States.
• Book club visits (virtual format preferred for groups under 50; in-person possible in driving distance of Cincinnati).

Compensation and travel

• Bookstores, libraries, book clubs, podcasts: Available without honorarium.
• University events, cultural centers, embassies: Travel expenses requested; honorarium negotiable.
• Corporate or commercial events: Standard speaker fee applies.

Direct contact