Tatiana Niculescu Bran was born in Bucharest, Romania. She holds degrees from the faculty of letters at the University of Bucharest and the European Institute of Journalism in Brussels. She worked as an editor for the Romanian Section of the BBC World Service (London) between 1995 and 2004 and headed the World Service’s Bucharest Bureau between 2004 and 2008. Read More In 2006, she published Romania’s first nonfiction novel, Spovedanie la Tanacu (The Confession), which was followed in 2007, by Cartea Judecatorilor (The Book of Judges). Cristian Mungiu’s film, Beyond the Hills, which won the best screenplay award at Cannes in 2012, was closely inspired by Niculescu Bran’s pair of nonfiction novels. Niculescu Bran’s other titles include In tara lui Dumnezeu (In the Land of God), a novel published in 2012, and two plays. Deadly Confession (directly inspired by the events recounted in The Confession and The Book of Judges) was directed by Andrei Serban and premiered in New York at La Mama in 2007. Brancusi contra SUA (Brancusi vs. the United States) looks at a case the Romanian sculptor Brancusi brought against the United States in 1926. In 2011 Polirom published her political novel The Nights of the Patriarch. On December 22, 2014, Bran will become spokesperson for Romania’s newly elected president, Klaus Johannis.