He was a Romanian novelist. Dumitriu was born in Bazias. His father was a Romanian army officer but his mother was Hungarian and spoke to her husband and son mostly in French, so that French was Petru Dumitriu"s second language from childhood. After school in Romania, Dumitriu studied philopsophy at Munich University with a Humboldt scholarship, but his studies were interrupted in 1944 when Romania changed sides in the Second World War. In 1960 Dumitriu fled from Romania to Germany and France, where he lived at Metz. He did not return to Romania until 1996.