Petru Popescu

Petru Popescu (born February 1, 1944 in Bucharest, Romania) is a Romanian-American writer, director and movie producer, author of best-selling novels Almost Adam and Amazon Beaming.

The son of theater critic Radu Popescu and actress Nelly Cutava, he graduated from the Spiru Haret high-school, after which he studied English language and literature at Bucharest University. His debut was a collection of poems, Zeu printre blocuri ("A God Between Apartment Buildings"). In 1969, he published Prins ("Caught").

He went on a Herder scholarship to Vienna (1971–1972), and in 1973 participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

After participating in the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, Popescu defected in 1973 or 1974 while in England on a private trip related to the English translation of his book Sfârşitul bahic, taught comparative literature in Great Britain, and moved to the United States in 1975, where he studied at the Center for Advanced Film Studies of the American Film Institute. The Romanian government tried him for treason. In Romania his books were banned.

At he time of his defection he was the Union of Communist Youth secretary of the Romanian Writers' Union and a candidate member of the Central Committee of the Union of Communist Youth.

In the USA, he married Iris Friedman, with whom he has two children: Adam and Chloe. His 2001 novel The Oasis is noted as "A memoir of love and survival in concentration camp" written in the first person as if in the words of the biographee, Blanka Friedman.

Popescu received a letter from Robert Redford inviting him to submit a script for consideration for the Sundance Film Festival. In 1983, Popescu took Death of an Angel to Sundance, where the script came to near finalization. The festival enabled him to find backers for the film, which was released in 1986.

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