Miroslav Penkov is a Bulgarian writer who writes in English and Bulgarian. [1] He was born in Gabrovo, Bulgaria in 1982, lived in Sofia for fourteen years and in 2001, at the age of 18, moved to the United States of America. [2] He studied for a bachelor's degree in psychology and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. [2] He teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas, where he is a fiction editor for the American Literary Review . [1]
His stories have been translated in over a dozen languages and have appeared in A Public Space , Granta, One Story , The Southern Review , The Sunday Times , The Best American Short Stories 2008 (edited by Salman Rushdie), [2] The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012 and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013.
When he was four years old, his family moved to Sofia, the capital city of Bulgaria. He spent fourteen years in Sofia, where he graduated from the First English Language High School. [3]
In 2007, his short story "Buying Lenin" won The Southern Review's Eudora Welty Prize in Fiction. [1] [4]
In 2012, his story "East of the West" won the BBC International Short Story Award. [2] [5] [6]
In 2014, Penkov was selected as a protégé by mentor Michael Ondaatje as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, an international philanthropic programme that pairs masters in their disciplines with emerging talents for a year of one-to-one creative exchange. [7]
Salman Rushdie included his short story How We Bought Lenin in the anthology The Best American Short Stories 2008, and the same text is included in the short story collection The First 20: Selected Stories from the First 20 Years of the 21st Century (2020) compiled by Alexander Shpatov and published by Ciela. The short story "East of the West" was honored in the anthologies PEN/O Henry Prize Stories 2012 and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013.
The collection of short stories "East of the West" has been published in 11 countries. It is a finalist for the 2012 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and the Steven Turner Award for First Fiction by the Texas Institute of Letters. In 2016, he published the novel "The Storks and the Mountain" in English and Bulgarian. [8]
Based on the author's story "Photo with Yuki", part of the collection "East of the West", a feature film of the same name was made. The main roles are played by Rushi Vidinliev and Kiki Sugino. The director of the film is Lachezar Avramov.
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