Bulgarian Contemporary Novel Contest Winners

As announced earlier, Open Letter, the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, and the America for Bulgarian Foundation sponsor a yearly contest to bring attention to the best of contemporary Bulgarian literature, with Open Letter publishing the winning title (or titles in this case).

This contest was launched in 2010, when Francis Bickmore of Canongate helped me select Milen Ruskov’s Thrown into Nature as the top entry of the year. (Milen’s book was just released—for more info on the book and how to purchase it, click here. You can also read a long sample here.)

For this year’s contest, Courtney Hodell of FSG joined me as a judge, and we went through 27 submissions ranging from the highly literary and experimental to thrillers to more spiritual pieces. It was a tough contest to judge, what with so many admirable and interesting entries, so in the end we ended up choosing two books: Angel Igov’s A Short Tale of Shame and Zachary Karabashliev’s 18% Gray. Both of these are being translated by Angela Rodel (who also did Thrown into Nature), and we’re planning on bringing out 18% Gray in November 2012, and A Short Tale of Shame in April 2013.

In addition, Courtney and I chose four runners-up: Ivan Dimitrov’s Life As a Missing Spoon, Ivanka Mogilska’s Hideaways, Vladislav Todorov’s Zincograph, and Vessel Tsankov’s _Pixel. Excerpts from all of these will appear on Contemporary Bulgarian Writers and on Three Percent.

Going back to the two winners, I’ll put up individual posts for both books with excerpts, descriptions, etc., etc. They’re quite different in terms of writing style—Shame consists of a series of internal monologues from different characters, 18% Gray is more cinematic and fast-paced—but both will make excellent additions to our list.