Contests for Bulgarian Writers and Translators

You may remember that last year, after a wonderful trip to Sozopol where I skinny dipped in the Black Sea, drank wine, met the most amazing writers, and heard the phrase “Kentucky Fried Chicken Happy Hour,” Open Letter launched two Bulgarian literature contests sponsored by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation. The first contest sponsored a two-week fellowship here in Rochester for a Bulgarian translator, and the other led to the upcoming publication of Milen Ruskov’s amazing Thrown into Nature.

Well, it’s time once again to announce the details and deadlines for this year’s contests . . .

In terms of the Contemporary Bulgarian Writers Contest Bulgarian citizens who have published at least one novel should send a 30-50 page sample translation along with a synopsis and author bio to Simona Ilieva (silieva [at] ekf.bg) by September 16th. The winning book will be published in English by Open Letter in the fall of 2012.

Translators from Bulgarian into English should apply for the Translators Fellowship by submitting a 20-page sample (10-pages if it’s a short story collection) of the book they would work on during the fellowship, along with a statement of purpose and information about their project. Again, this should be submitted to Simona Ilieva (silieva [at] ekf.bg) by September 20th.

These were fun contests to judge last year, and everything worked out amazingly well. Milen’s novel is absolutely wonderful (more info on that when it’s featured as part of Read This Next), and it was a lot of fun having Zdravka Evtimova here for a few weeks while she worked on her translation of Master Mille’s Living Light and Other Stories by Boyan Biolchev. Hope we get a lot of entries again this year . . .