About E. J. Bancesco E. J. Bancesco is the pen name of Emmanuel J. Bancesco, a Romanian-born architect and novelist. Born in Bucharest in 1951, he earned his architecture degree there in 1975 and emigrated to the United States in 1983. From 1998 to 2003 he studied Advanced Painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Since 2005 he has worked with an international architecture firm, leading projects across Spain, the United Kingdom, China, the Middle East, and Mexico City. He is the author of two novels published by All Things That Matter Press: Adrift, a bildungsroman drawing on memories of a Romanian boyhood, and The Scarf. His prose is shaped by a lifelong love of reading and a painter's eye, treating language as both music and image. Among the writers he most admires are Tolstoy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kazuo Ishiguro, Amanda Coplin, and Donna Tartt. He is married, with one daughter who does humanitarian work with NGOs in South Africa. Beyond writing and architecture, he paints, collects stamps, and fishes.