Matej Vishnek (b. 1956), Romanian-French writer, poet and, according to critics, the most significant playwright after Eugene Ionesco, author of twenty plays staged in more than 30 countries. In the novel Panic Syndrome in the City of Lights, Vishnek guides the reader with a confident hand through a complex plot labyrinth, woven from many divergent stories. The background of the entire narrative is Paris - but not the city known to everyone from tourist guides, but Vishnek’s own “Paris”, in which he discovers mysterious places unknown to tourists and where he briefly communicates with the great shadows of the past - as on the real Champs Elysees.