Some Kind of Second Heart – New Bulgarian Writing
Contributors’ Notes
Teodora Dimova is among the most well known of Bulgarian writers. She is the author of nine plays, including Skinless, Snake Milk, The Bitch, The Lovers, and The Innocents, staged at numerous theaters in Bulgaria as well as abroad. In recent years, she has published the novels Emine, Mothers, Adriana, and Marma, Mariam. In 2006, her novel Mothers won the award for literary works from Southeastern Europe of Bank Austria and KulturKontakt. It has eleven Bulgarian editions and has been published in nine languages, including German, French, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Slovenian, among others. Adriana has been translated into French and Czech. In 2010, Marma, Mariam won the National Hristo G. Danov Award for literature. Her novel The Train to Emmaus (2013) won the 2014 fiction award of Kultura.bg. Her latest book, the novella, The First Birthday, was published by Ciela in 2016.
Zdravka Evtimova was born in Bulgaria, where she lives and works as a literary translator. She holds a BA in English language and literature, and an MA in contemporary American literature, University Kiril and Methodius, Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria. Her short stories have appeared in thirty-one countries in the world, including the USA, UK, Canada, China, Australia, Germany, France, Japan, and Italy. Her short story collections include: Bitter Sky (Skrev Press, UK, 2003), Somebody Else (MAG Press, USA, 2005), Pale and Other Postmodern Bulgarian Stories (Vox Humana, Canada, 2010), Carts and Other Stories (Fomite Press, USA 2012), and, most recently, Parable of Stones and Other Stories (ATTM Press, USA, 2017). In 2015, Evtimova’s short story Seldom was included in the anthology Best European Fiction 2015 (Dalkey Archive Press). Her story Blood of a Mole was included in the English textbooks for high schools in Denmark in 2015. Her novel Sinfonia Bulgarica was published in the US by Fomite Books, 2014, and reprinted in translation in Italy, China, Macedonia, and Serbia. Her novel In the Town of Joy and Peace was published by in the US by Fomite Books, in 2017.
Petar Krumov was born in Sofia in 1988. He graduated from the National High School for Ancient Languages and Cultures in 2007. He took two years of cultural studies at Sofia University before pursuing a degree in film and TV directing at the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts, which he completed in 2014. His short film Shame (2017) has been included in the selections of the San Sebastián International Film Festival and the Moscow International Film Festival, has been appointed a Clermont-Ferrand International Film Festival’s nominee for the European Film Awards 2018, and is the recipient of a Special Mention from the Sofia International Film Festival 2018. His film criticism on works of Jean-Luc Godard, Bruno Dumont, Aleksandr Sokurov, Tsai Ming-liang, Mike Lee, Alejandro González Iñárritu, among others, has appeared in Kultura. His first novel, Hearse, Two Rhinoceros, (Colibri, 2017), has won The Quill Award for best literary debut in 2017, and has been nominated for the 13 Centuries Bulgaria National Fund’s award for Best Novel of the Year.
Rumen Pavlov, thirty-two years old, lives in Sofia, Bulgaria. He graduated from English language high school and has a bachelor degree in International economic relations from the University of National and World Economy, Sofia, and a master degree in Film and TV directing at New Bulgarian University, Sofia. He writes poems, short stories and plays and translates poetry and fiction from English into Bulgarian and vice versa. He is a member of “Sensory theatre – Sofia,” which develops interactive performances in unusual places. His short story “A Short Interpretation of Human Subjects” is part of a short story collection-in-progress, The Blue Mountain.
Vladimir Poleganov (b. 1979, Sofia) is a Bulgarian writer, translator, and screenwriter. He is the author of one collection of short stories, The Deconstruction of Thomas S (published in 2013 by St. Kliment Ohridski University Press) and one novel, The Other Dream (2016, Colibri). His short stories have appeared in various literary magazines in Bulgaria and abroad. “The Birds,” a short story, was featured in Dalkey Archive Press’ anthology Best European Fiction 2016. In 2016, he participated in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. He has translated novels by writers such as Thomas Pynchon, Octavia E. Butler, and Peter Beagle into Bulgarian. He is currently working on a PhD in Bulgarian literature at Sofia University, where he also teaches a course on fantastic literature.
Georgi Tenev is a contemporary Bulgarian novelist and short-story writer. His books include Vunderkind (2004), Chriso, Castro and Free Love (2005), Bulgarian Roses (2016), the short story collections Holy Light (2010) and The Writer’s Wife (2017). His novel Party Headquarters (2006) received the Vick Foundation Award for Novel of the year. His work has been published in German, English, Polish and Spanish.
Albena Todorova was born in 1983 in the former Soviet Union, grew up in Sofia, Bulgaria and lived in Japan before moving to Germany in 2014. She studied Modern Japanese Literature and became interested in poetry during her years as a scholar and Japanese language teacher and translator. She is the author of two books of poems and is currently working on a third one. Her first book of poems was awarded the Ivan Nikolov Poetry Prize in 2014. In 2018 her second book of poems was shortlisted for the Nikolay Kantchev Poetry Prize.
