I was born in Varna, Bulgaria, on the edge of the Black Sea ? a place where history is never really "past". Growing up between old empires and new borders, I was surrounded by stories of wars, occupations, disappearances and sudden changes of flag.

Later I moved to Warsaw, Poland, where I studied history and public relations at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). Warsaw is a city built on ruins and memories, and it forced me to ask one question over and over again:

Why is so much of our most important history told in the most boring way possible?

Like every history student, I spent endless hours buried in heavy academic books ? dates, treaties, footnotes stacked on footnotes. I respected the work, but I often felt like the life had been drained out of the events themselves.

That changed when I discovered Ryszard Kapuscinski. His books had that rare tone I'd been searching for: history and politics told through people, scenes and atmosphere. It was factual, but it breathed.

From that moment I knew what I wanted to do: take serious history and tell it with the clarity and tension of a documentary ? so future generations don't have to suffer through dead, lifeless books to understand the past.

My books focus on the places where power is most visible ? and most hidden:

• Wars and battles
• Espionage and cyber conflict
• Country histories

Some books are big, sweeping national histories. Others zoom in on a single battle, uprising or covert operation. All of them try to answer the same question: What really happened here, and what does it mean for the people who had to live through it?

If you read my books, you can expect narrative, scene-by-scene storytelling ? not just lists of dates. Serious research from archives, memoirs, official reports and investigative journalism. Clear explanations of complex events like cyberattacks and proxy wars. And a refusal to simplify messy, uncomfortable truths.

I don't write official history. I don't write propaganda. I write stories that are honest, human and readable ? the kind of books I was always looking for as a student and rarely found.

If you care about how we got from trenches and partitions to cyberwar and drone strikes ? and you don't want to fall asleep over another textbook ? I wrote these books for you.