Oana Aristide, a macroeconomist by background who started her career at the Romanian Central Bank where she also worked with the office of the Romanian Prime Minister. She has worked as Chief Economist at Dun & Bradstreet in London before leaving it all to manage a boutique eco-hotel on the island of Syros in Greece. As if the refurbishment project of turning a heritage villa into a hotel would not have been challenging enough, the global pandemic delayed the formal opening of Hotel Aristide by one season to the 2021 summer season. Oana is also a published author, with her debut novel (Under the Blue) being published by Serpents Tail in March 2021. A page-turning climate dystopian novel, Under the Blue is a literally thriller about a pandemic and the rise of AI. In our conversation we follow Oana’s journey from a Romanian emigrant growing up in Sweden, to being a macroeconomist in Romania and London, to being a hotelier and a published novelist. We talk about what it means to lead the refurbishment project behind Hotel Aristide during a global pandemic, which is incidentally one of the main themes of Oana’s first book.