Interview With Author Andrei Romanov
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I’m an independent historian and writer based in the Algarve, Portugal, about twenty minutes from Sagres, the town where Prince Henry the Navigator established his base for Atlantic exploration in the fifteenth century. Living here isn’t just convenient for my research; it’s inspiring. I can walk to the cliffs where Portuguese sailors once stood before sailing into the unknown, and I conduct primary research in the same archives where the original voyage logs and account books are kept.
I was born in Bucharest, Romania, nine months before the fall of communism, and I grew up in a world that was rebuilding itself from scratch. That experience of living through a historical transformation shaped how I think about history, not as something distant and academic, but as something that happens to real people with real consequences.
Before I became a writer, I had what some people might call an unusual career trajectory. I have a degree in International Economic Relations and have spent over 15 years working in international trade, European affairs, and geopolitical strategy. I was also the Romanian National Bodybuilding Champion in 2009 and competed at European and World Championships until 2015. Bodybuilding taught me discipline, patience, and the ability to work toward a goal for years without immediate gratification, skills that turned out to be exactly what I needed to write history books.
I speak three languages fluently: Romanian, Portuguese, and English. This helps enormously when reading fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Portuguese documents, which form the backbone of my research.
Masters of the Ocean Sea is my first book. I published it independently in January 2026 after spending months in Portuguese archives, reading account books, voyage logs, and royal correspondence that most people have never seen. It’s been an incredible journey. The book is rated 5 stars by Readers’ Favorite, has a 4.9-star rating on Amazon, is a #1 Bestseller in History of Spain & Portugal, and is now held in the Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, one of the most important maritime research libraries in the world.
When I’m not writing or buried in archives, I enjoy walking the coastal trails of the Algarve, growing hot peppers (Carolina Reaper, Trinidad Scorpion, Habanero Red), smoking cigars while watching the Atlantic, and thinking about the next book.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
My latest, and first book, is Masters of the Ocean Sea: The Epic Saga of the Portuguese Explorers Who Redrew the Map of the World.
The inspiration came from a simple frustration: I moved to Portugal in 2025 and realised I didn’t know nearly enough about Portuguese maritime history, even though I was literally living twenty minutes from where it all began. I went looking for a book that would tell me the whole story, not just the famous names like Vasco da Gama, but also the financial mechanics, the navigational techniques, the human cost, the geopolitical strategy, and I couldn’t find it.
There are academic books that are too dense for general readers. There are popular histories that skip over Portugal entirely and focus on Columbus and the Spanish. But there wasn’t a single book that combined serious research with accessible storytelling and focused specifically on how Portugal, a tiny kingdom with barely one million people, managed to build a maritime empire that stretched from Brazil to Japan.
So I decided to write it myself.
I spent months in the Torre do Tombo, Portugal’s national archive in Lisbon, reading fifteenth-century account books and voyage logs. I visited museums, walked the beaches where the first European slave auctions happened, and stood in the chapel at Sagres where Prince Henry the Navigator is said to have planned his expeditions. I wanted to write the book I wished I could have read when I first moved here, one that would make readers feel as if they were standing on the deck of a caravel, watching the coast of Africa appear over the horizon for the first time.
The book asks a fundamental question: How did they do it? How did wooden ships with primitive instruments cross oceans that no European had ever crossed? How did Portugal finance these incredibly risky voyages? How did navigators figure out where they were without GPS, satellites, or even accurate clocks?
And it doesn’t shy away from the darker side of the story, the violence, the slave trade, the destruction of civilisations. The Age of Discovery changed the world forever, and not always for the better. I wanted to tell the whole story, not just the heroic parts.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I write at night, usually with a cigar. There’s something about the quiet and the darkness that helps me focus. During the day, my mind is too busy with emails, errands, and research logistics. But at night, it’s just me and the blank page.
I also have a habit of walking while I think. If I’m stuck on a sentence or trying to figure out how to structure a chapter, I’ll leave my desk and walk to the beach. There’s something about standing at the edge of the Atlantic, watching the waves crash against the rocks, that helps me think clearly. I imagine what it must have felt like for Portuguese sailors to stand in this exact spot six hundred years ago, knowing they were about to sail past the edge of the known world.
Another unusual habit: I keep a notebook next to my bed because some of my best ideas come to me right before I fall asleep or right when I wake up. There’s something about that half-conscious state where your brain makes connections it wouldn’t make during the day. I’ve woken up at 3 a.m. with a sudden realisation about how to structure a chapter and had to write it down immediately before I forgot.
Finally, I don’t outline in the traditional sense. I research obsessively, take hundreds of pages of notes, and then I just start writing. The structure emerges as I go. Some people would find that terrifying, but for me, it’s the only way that works.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
If I’m being completely honest? Erik Larson basically rewired my brain. The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake showed me that history doesn’t have to sit there on the page like a museum exhibit behind velvet ropes. Larson takes these massive, sprawling historical moments and makes them move. Makes them breathe. You’re not learning about the past; you’re in it, heart pounding, wondering what happens next, even though, technically, you could just look up the ending on Wikipedia. That urgency, that aliveness, that’s what I chased with Masters of the Ocean Sea. I wanted readers on those ships, salt in their faces, not safely distant in a library chair.
Then there’s Saidiya Hartman, who fundamentally changed how I think about the people history tries to erase. Her idea of “critical fabulation” is both painful and necessary. It’s saying, “I don’t know what they felt.” The archives ate their voices. But I won’t pretend they didn’t exist, and I won’t look away from that silence. Writing about enslaved people, Indigenous populations, I couldn’t just centre the Portuguese explorers and call it done. But I also couldn’t fake intimacy with lives the historical record deliberately destroyed. Hartman taught me to sit with that tension, to honour it.
David Grann’s The Lost City of Z showed me structure as quest, as obsession, the way you can braid past and present until they’re inseparable. How personal research becomes the story, not just scaffolding for it. So I wove myself in, too. My months in Portugal, my own archival hunger. Because that’s part of how history actually happens: someone standing in a dusty room, heart racing over a document.
For understanding empire as a system, as a machine, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams. Those books don’t let you compartmentalise. They show you capitalism, slavery, and empire as one horrific, intricate organism. That lens transformed how I saw Portuguese expansion: not some swashbuckling adventure story, but the blueprint for the modern global economy, built on violence and ledgers.
And fiction writers! Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall taught me that historical figures have skin. They sweat, they smell bread baking, they have migraines and grudges and complicated relationships with their bodies. Mantel’s sensory richness, I tried to steal that. Because the past wasn’t abstract. It was tactile.
So yeah. That’s the constellation of voices in my head while writing.
What are you working on now?
Right now, I’m working on a three-part essay series for Global Maritime History about the padrões, the stone markers Portuguese navigators planted on foreign shores to claim territory. Part 1 has just been published, and I’m finishing Part 2, which examines the strategic and legal significance of these markers and how the Portuguese model of maritime empire differed from the Spanish, Dutch, and British models.
I’m also working on several articles under peer review at academic journals like the International Journal of Maritime History, History of European Ideas, and Itinerario. These dive deeper into specific aspects of Portuguese exploration, from how the Crown financed voyages as an early venture capital program to how Portuguese navigators learned monsoon navigation from Afro-Asian sailors.
But the big project I’m thinking about, though it’s still in the early research phase, is a book about the kingdoms and civilisations the Portuguese encountered during the Age of Exploration, told from their perspective before the Portuguese arrived.
What were the Kingdom of Kongo, the Swahili city-states, the Zamorin of Calicut, and the Shogunate of Japan actually like before European ships showed up? What were their economies, their politics, their cultures? How did they see the world? And then, when the Portuguese arrived, how did these societies respond? What did they think of these strange pale men in wooden ships who couldn’t stop talking about spices and Jesus?
Most popular histories of the Age of Discovery are told entirely from the European perspective, as if the rest of the world was just sitting there waiting to be “discovered.” But that’s not true. These were sophisticated civilisations with their own histories, ambitions, and agency. I want to write a book that centres them, not the Europeans.
It’s a large research project, and I’m still assessing feasibility, but it’s the book I keep thinking about.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
Honestly? I’m still figuring this out.
I published Masters of the Ocean Sea independently, which means I don’t have a traditional publisher’s marketing team behind me. Everything I’ve done has been DIY, and it’s been a steep learning curve.
The most effective thing so far has been getting the book into the hands of readers who already love maritime history and exploration. That meant submitting articles to history websites like Ancient Origins and Global Maritime History, where I can reach people who are genuinely interested in this subject. Each article includes a mention of the book, and that’s driven more sales than any ad campaign I’ve tried.
Getting a 5-star review from Readers’ Favorite was huge. That review gave me credibility and made it easier to pitch the book to other reviewers and institutions. And getting the book accepted into the Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
Social media has been less effective for me, mostly because I’m not naturally a social media person. I have a LinkedIn presence, which feels more professional and appropriate for the kind of book I’ve written, but Instagram and Twitter haven’t done much for me. I post regularly, but it feels like shouting into the void.
The advice I’d give to other indie authors: focus on building credibility first. Get reviews. Get your book into libraries. Publish articles that establish you as an expert. That credibility translates into sales more effectively than any amount of paid advertising could.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Write the book you want to read.
I know that sounds cliché, but it’s the best advice I can give. I didn’t write Masters of the Ocean Sea because I thought it would be a bestseller or because I was following some formula. I wrote it because I moved to Portugal, got obsessed with this history, and couldn’t find the book I wanted to read. So I wrote it myself.
If you’re writing to chase trends or because you think a certain type of book will sell, you’ll burn out. But if you’re writing because you genuinely care about the subject and you want to share that passion with readers, that enthusiasm will come through on every page.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
“I don’t remember Herodotus having a PhD.”
A friend told me this when I was hesitating about whether I was “qualified” to write a history book without formal academic credentials. It was exactly what I needed to hear.
Herodotus, the so-called “Father of History,” didn’t have a PhD. He didn’t have institutional backing. He just travelled, asked questions, wrote down what he learned, and tried to make sense of it. That’s what historians do. The PhD is a modern invention. The curiosity and the discipline to research carefully, that’s what matters.
What are you reading now?
Right now, I’m reading D. Afonso Henriques by José Mattoso, which is a biography of Portugal’s first king. Afonso Henriques declared independence from León in 1139 and spent the next decades consolidating Portuguese territory and pushing the Moors south. Mattoso is one of Portugal’s most respected medieval historians, and reading him in Portuguese has been both challenging and rewarding, helping me understand the deep roots of Portuguese identity and ambition that would eventually drive maritime expansion three centuries later.
What’s next for you as a writer?
In the short term, I’m finishing the padrões essay series for Global Maritime History and waiting to hear back from several academic journals about articles I’ve submitted for peer review.
I’m also working on some creative nonfiction essays that are more personal and experimental than my historical writing. I’ve submitted a piece called “The Grain Elevator Operator” to a couple of literary journals, and I’m working on an essay about my grandmother, who survived the Holodomor in Ukraine and spent two years fleeing the Nazis through fascist Romania. These essays are a way for me to explore my own family history and my complicated relationship with Eastern European identity.
In the longer term, I’m researching that book I mentioned earlier about the kingdoms and civilisations the Portuguese encountered, told from their perspective before European contact. It’s a huge project, and I’m not sure yet if I can pull it off, but it’s the book I can’t stop thinking about.
Ultimately, I want to keep writing books that make history feel alive and urgent, that show readers why the past still matters, and that tell stories people haven’t heard before. Whether that’s Portuguese exploration, my own family history, or something entirely different, I’m not sure yet. But I’m excited to find out.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
1. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. A Roman emperor writing philosophical reflections while on military campaigns, it’s the ultimate book for someone dealing with difficult circumstances. Stoic philosophy has always resonated with me, probably because I grew up in post-communist Romania, where you learned early that complaining doesn’t change anything, but how you respond to circumstances can. Plus, it’s short enough that I could memorise it, which would be useful if the physical book got damaged.
2. A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov. I grew up reading Russian literature; my mother made sure of that, and Lermontov has always been my favourite. Pechorin is cynical, restless, self-destructive, and utterly compelling. The book is dark and philosophical and refuses to offer easy answers about how to live. If I’m stuck on a desert island, I want something that will make me think, not comfort me with false hope.
3. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli. I know it’s a strange choice for a desert island, but hear me out: Machiavelli understood power, strategy, and human nature better than almost anyone. If I’m stranded and need to survive, I want to be thinking like someone who understands how the world actually works, not how we wish it worked. Plus, it’s short, dense, and endlessly rereadable.
4. The SAS Survival Handbook by John “Lofty” Wiseman. Because let’s be practical here, I’m going to need to know how to find water, build shelter, catch food, and signal for rescue. Marcus Aurelius and Machiavelli won’t help me with that.
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