About Raz
Author, modern hermit and quiet observer
Raz writes about divine love, consciousness and the distance between what the soul experiences and what language can hold.
Romanian-born and based in the United Kingdom, he works from solitude, meditation, long walks and a lasting connection with Seoul.
In my own words
The journey behind the books
My journey began long before I called myself an author. It began in childhood, with an inexplicable void inside that I learned to fill with love and prayer.
Read my full story
My name is Razvan Teodor Mihalcea, and I use Raz Mihal as my pen name in the United Kingdom. Between 2008 and 2014, I also wrote online as RaaVi.
My adventure on social media began when I changed the direction of my day-to-day work and searched for a passion that would always oblige me to learn something new. I found web design and development, which remains a hobby in my free time.
I live and work in the United Kingdom, having left Romania in December 2014. That is about it regarding the material side of the author. I am a person like everyone else, with vices and problems, both material and psychological.
My spiritual journey began in childhood, with an inexplicable void inside that I only managed to fill with love and prayer.
My first book, published in Romania as Inimi ale Iubirii, was born from an experience that defined my spiritual practice and gave me the vision I still carry of absolute and infinite love, and of its reflection in the love known in our lives. I called it Divine Love.
On the night of 3-4 June 1998, everything I would later write seemed to be revealed to me. Two or three days afterwards, I wrote the first chapters continuously for 16 hours, almost blinded by what I was experiencing.
In 1999, I realised that what I had written in a notebook was already a book, with chapters formed and organised much as they appear in the Romanian edition. I did not write it in order to publish it. I wrote it to release what was burning inside me.
After choosing a publisher and making many corrections myself, the manuscript went to print. The person who was expected to correct it found the text too difficult, uncertain where some sentences began or ended and how they should be interpreted.
The pseudonym Otto, used on the original cover, came from a nickname given to me by a friend during the spiritual conversations that found their way into our ordinary days.
I still find the book difficult to read. Yet I do not think I could write it better now than I did then. Its form makes the reader return to certain passages to reach beyond the words. Without living at least a little through love in your own heart, you may have no chance of finishing it.
Don't shoot the messenger.
The modern hermit
Solitude as a place of listening
For Raz, being a modern hermit does not mean withdrawing from humanity. It means creating enough silence to hear what ordinary noise conceals. That silence is where observation becomes meditation and where experience can be examined without forcing it into a system.
His writing does not ask the reader to adopt a doctrine. It offers reflections, questions and doorways, leaving each person free to recognise what belongs to their own inner life.
The work
Three recurring currents
Divine love
Love considered not only as human emotion, but as a spiritual force that may exceed the lover and the beloved.
Consciousness
The self, the soul, memory and the elusive boundary between inward experience and the world we can describe.
Imagined futures
Questions of artificial consciousness, android life and whether love could awaken in forms unlike our own.
Seoul
A city that became part of the meditation
Seoul appears throughout Raz's writing as more than a location. Its streets, rooftops, river, towers and long walking routes became a living structure for attention, memory and spiritual reflection.
That relationship continues into The Goddess Within, a future novel conceived in a Seoul transformed by biotechnology but still carrying the ancient human questions of love and soul.
Selected path
From an early book to a future Seoul
Inimi ale Iubirii
Raz's first Romanian book explored ideas that are now being reconsidered and retranslated as Hearts of Love.
Just Love Her
A poetic and spiritual meditation published by Mystic Publishing, later recognised by Readers' Favorite and Literary Titan.
The Goddess Within
A work in development set in future Seoul, asking whether an artificial being can experience love and possess a soul.