Born and educated in the UK, Lucy Mallows worked for 12 years in Budapest as a reporter. She first visited Transylvania in 1997, but her links with Romania go back to the late 1980s when she worked as a volunteer for Operation Romanian Villages, and to an early childhood fairytale The Lost Princess, written in 1924 by Queen Marie of Romania.

Lucy Mallows is also the author of the Bradt guides to Bratislava and Slovakia. She now lives in Brighton from where she works as a freelance photojournalist and translator. Paul Brummell is the British Ambassador to Romania. A career diplomat, he joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1987.

He has served as British Ambassador to Turkmenistan and to Kazakhstan (as well as non-resident Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan) and High Commissioner to the countries of the eastern Caribbean, based in Barbados. He is the author of Bradt Travel Guides to Turkmenistan and to Kazakhstan, and in 2016 was awarded the CMG for services to British foreign policy.