Felicia Mihali

In 2007, a Canadian soldier stationed in Kandahar sent a letter to Maclean’s magazine thanking the editors for the cover of their annual University Student Edition, which featured a young Canadian woman of Romanian descent, who became the new “pin-up” girl for the soldier and his comrades.  Headlines flashed “The Darling of Kandahar", inspiring Romanian-Canadian writer Felicia Mihali’s first novel in English. The soldier, Sergeant Christos Karigiannis, died a short time after he wrote the letter.