He was born in Curtea de Argeș, Romania. Growing up, Suceavă spent his holidays with his maternal grandparents at Nucșoara, a remote community that maintained its traditions, unbroken by the collectivisation elsewhere of Nicolae Ceaușescu's regime. There he absorbed Balkan folk-tales and myths, which would inform some of his literary works. Suceavă mentioned his maternal grandmother was a cousin of Elisabeta Rizea, a figure of the Romanian anti-communist resistance movement.