Sînziana Păltineanu is a writer and historian. After having studied English and Japanese at the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania, she completed a PhD in history in 2013 at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. More recently, she was awarded an eight-month fellowship in literature at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. In 2015 she published her first novel, Elephant Chronicles, available as a free e-book in English and German at: http://fiktion.cc/books/elephant-chronicles/