Monica Lovinescu

A graduate of the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Letters, she made her literary debut in Vremea magazine, regularly publishing prose works in Revista Fundațiilor Regale and theater chronicles in Democrația.

From the 1960s onwards, she was a journalist for Radio Free Europe, creating two weekly pieces that were influential in generating an internal opposition to the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime.

Her weekly radio shows, Theses and Antitheses in Paris (Teze și antiteze la Paris) and Romanian Cultural Current Affairs (Actualitatea culturală românească), spoken with a hoarse but warm and friendly voice, were followed with interest and with a glimmer of hope by countless Romanians who, from beyond the Iron Curtain, they were secretly listening to Radio Free Europe.

Romanian defector Ion Mihai Pacepa claimed that in 1977 she was severely beaten by three Palestine Liberation Organization officers, one disguised as a French mailman, allegedly at the direction of Ceaușescu.

In December 2023, a monumental ensemble featuring statues of Lovinescu and Ierunca united by a stainless steel mantle, next to a tree of evil (a parable of the Securitate agents that had infiltrated Radio Free Europe) was inaugurated in the Cotroceni neighborhood of Bucharest.