Romanian-born Andrei Roman moved to Brazil in 2006 as part of an academic exchange program, attracted by his fascination with Latin American literature and the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges. He spent around half a year in Brazil’s Northeast region, getting to know the country’s nonsense realities and researching ways to battle poverty.
A political scientist and Ph.D. in government from Harvard University, he studied every Brazilian election since the country’s return to democracy in the mid-1980s, coming to the realization that domestic politics are not too far removed from the magical realism of his dele…