Who I Am
My every day name is Alexander Duvan. Tudor Alexander is my pen name. The reason for the pen name is given in the Acknowledgement to my first novel, The Runners (Fugarii).
Today I write and publish in both Romanian and English, and this site was designed to accommodate readers of both languages. Most of my main characters are immigrants yearning to adapt to their new surroundings and escape their past. They are the people who, like myself, took a leap of faith and, leaving loved ones, friends, familiar streets and echoing songs behind, followed the promise of political and intellectual freedoms, and the lure of lavish homes and gardens depicted in Hollywood movies.
Born in Bucharest in 1950, I came to the United States in 1977 from Communist Romania. I started writing while in high school, and published fifteen short stories in literary magazines. After the revolution lifted the constraints of censure and artistic expression, and Romania welcomed expatriate writers, I started writing for a Romanian weekly, and, in 1992, edited a book length collection of articles from major American and British newspapers about the Romanian Revolution (Revoluția Română).
I published my first novel, The Runners (Fugarii, in Romanian), in 1994, followed by Smoke (Fum), a 100-page novella, in 1997 (optioned for a movie by Lucian Pintilie, a leading Romanian movie director).
Planet New York was written in English and published by Xlibris in 2000 in the United States and then, in my translation, in Romania in 2001. In 2007 Planet New York received an Honorary Mention at the New York Book Fest. A collection of short stories, One Morning and One Afternoon (O dimineaţă şi o după amiază) was published in Romania in 2002.
Translated into Romanian, my novel The Visitor (Vizitatorul), was published in May 2011 by Junimea, a well known publishing house in Iasi, Romania, to excellent reviews.
My latest novel, No Portrait in the Gilded Frame was published by CreateSpace in the summer of 2016.
My education includes an MBA from the University of Connecticut and a Master's Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest.
I live in Columbia, Maryland with Viorica, my wife of over fourty years. Our two grown children have moved away: our daughter lives in Colorado and our son in California.
Please go to the Writings section of this website to see more details about my published work, both in Romanian and English, and my manuscripts (work in progress).
I belong to several novel writing workshops and I am a member of the Maryland Writers Association. I maintain a weekly blog on literary topics and a presence on Goodreads. To buy my books please go to my author's page on Amazon.
Currently I am working on a new novel (working tilte: The Ultimate Patient).
