Sándor Romano Rácz (Ecseg, 1940) writer and sociologist, was born in County Nógrád in 1941, from the family of a Roma village musician. Between 1941 and 1950 his father was enrolled in the Army and then a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union, thus he received the decisive impulses of his education from his grandparents. He became a civil engineer, and in 1991 he embarked on a scholarly career and began to publish in the press. His major publications are a Roma-Hungarian dictionary and Grammar, and studies about the Roma minority and social cohesion. He gives classes at Eötvös Loránd University on the latter subject.