Translators from Bulgarian - Sofia Literary Agency

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Angela Rodel

Photo © Personal аrchive

Angela Rodel is a literary translator from Bulgarian into English, who holds degrees from Yale and UCLA. Her translations have appeared in McSweeney’s, Two Lines, Ploughshares, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She has received NEA and PEN translation grants; seven novels in her translation have been published in the US and UK. Her translation of Georgi Gospodinov’s Physics of Sorrow won the 2016 AATSEEL Prize for Literary Translation as well as an NEA Translation grant. Her translation of his novel Time Shelter was featured on The New Yorker’s list of Best Books of 2022 and won the 2023 International Booker Prize. Since 2015 she has served as executive director of the Bulgarian-American Fulbright Commission.

Christopher Buxton

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Christopher Buxton, teacher, writer, and literary translator from Bulgarian into English was born in 1950 and graduated English and American Literature in the UK. He was granted Bulgarian citizenship for services to Bulgarian culture in 2019, following considerable work, translating and promoting Bulgarian writers. These include published translations of Rumen Balabanov, Izabela Shopova, Milen Ruskov, Alek Popov, Yordan Slaveykov, Deyan Enev, Georgi Burdarov, Rusana Burdarska, Kalin Terziiski, Kerana Angelova. He has translated and had published a considerable number of Bulgarian classic and contemporary poets.

David Mossop

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David Mossop is a translator and interpreter from Bulgarian, Russian and French. He has a bachelor’s Degree in Russian and French, and a PhD in Bulgarian linguistics from Sofia University. Literary translation has been his passion for more than 30 years. He has more than 30 published translations of works of Bulgarian literature into English, including works by Lubomir Levchev, Stefan Tsanev, Kalin Terziiski, and plays by Hristo Boytchev, Boyan Papazov and Ivan Kulekov. He collaborated with Hristo Hristov on the biography of Georgi Markov, Kill the Wanderer. In 2022, he was awarded the Special Prize for Outstanding Achievements by the Union Translators in Bulgaria for his work on Bulgarian and Macedonian history, Bulgaria and Macedonia. History and Politics.

Ekaterina Petrova

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Ekaterina Petrova holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship. Her book-length translations include Dimitar “Shosho” Kotzev’s novel Shrimp (ICU Press, 2024), the anthologies My Brother’s Suitcase, Fathers Never Go Away, and Stories from the ’90s (ICU Press, 2020, 2020, 2023), and Bogdan Rusev’s novel Come to Me (Dalkey Archive Press, 2019). Her work has also appeared in various publications, including Asymptote, Words Without Borders, European Literature Network, and Reading in Translation. Her translation of Iana Boukova’s poetry collection Notes of the Phantom Woman (co-translated with John O’Kane from the Greek) is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2024, while her translation of Boukova’s novel Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow, for which she received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, is forthcoming from New York Review Books in 2026.

Izidora Angel

Photo © Albana Pepaj

Izidora Angel (1980) is a Bulgarian-born writer and literary translator in Chicago. She is the author of three full-length translations, including Hristo Karastoyanov‘s The Same Night Awaits Us All and Nataliya Deleva’s Four Minutes. Izidora received a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for her work on Yordanka Beleva’s collection of stories, Keder, and the 2023 Gulf Coast Translation Prize for her work on Rene Karabash’s novel, She Who Remains, which is forthcoming from Sandorf Passage in 2026. Izidora’s translations, essays and interviews have been featured in Best Literary Translations 2024, Astra Magazine, Words Without Borders, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast Journal, Firmament, Two Lines Journal, Chicago Reader, and elsewhere. Her writing has been recognized by English PEN, Art Omi, Bread Loaf, and by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, which in 2023 awarded her a writing fellowship for her in-progress memoir.

Katerina Stoykova

Photo © Yana Lozeva

Katerina Stoykova is the author of Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House (University Press of Kentucky, 2024) and The Poet’s Guide to Publishing: How to Conceive, Arrange, Edit, Publish and Market a Book of Poetry (McFarland, 2024). Katerina is the founder and senior editor of Accents Publishing, as well as the creator of the Accents podcast on WUKY. Katerina currently serves as a Director of the Kentucky Book Festival, as well as the Director for the Center for the Book in Kentucky. She is the main translator of volumes of selected poems by Marin Bodakov and Khairi Hamdan, as well as The Season of Delicate Hunger: Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry.

Tom Phillips

Photo © Will Buckingham

Tom Phillips is a UK-born poet, translator and lecturer who has translated a vast range of Bulgarian writing over the course of the last ten years. The outer limits of the spectrum of work that he’s translated are Hristo Stoichkov’s autobiography, on the one hand, and Geo Milev’s poetry, on the other. He has also translated and/or edited translations of poetry and prose by many of Bulgaria’s leading contemporary writers. Tom’s own work as a writer has been widely published in journals, anthologies, pamphlets and three full-length poetry collections. He currently teaches creative writing and translation at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski.

Traci Speed

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Traci Speed received her PhD in Slavic Linguistics from UC Berkeley, where Bulgarian was her main language of focus. She came to Bulgaria in 2017 on a Fulbright research grant and never left. She is the translator of Alek Popov’s novel Mission: Turan, and she has translated stories, excerpts, and film scripts for many contemporary Bulgarian authors, including Zachary Karabashliev, Boyan Belchev, and Georgi Tenev, as well as numerous museum catalogues and academic works. Traci is an assistant professor at Sofia University, where she teaches Bulgarian-English translation, as well as classes in grammar and history of the English language.

Yana Ellis

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Yana Ellis is a translator of literary and creative texts from Bulgarian and German to English. She holds an MA in Translation from the University of Bristol. Yana was chosen as one of the American Literary Translators’ Association (ALTA) Virtual Travel Fellows for 2022 and was shortlisted for the 2022 John Dryden Translation Competition. Her work has appeared in The Trinity JoLT, No man’s Land, The Common, SAND journal and Trafika Europe. Yana’s translation of Zdravka Evtimova’s The Wolves of Staro Selo received a PEN Translates award and is forthcoming with Héloïse Press in 2025.

Zlatomira Terzieva

Photo © Siyana Dimitrova

Zlatomira Terzieva (1999) is a Bulgarian translator into English and an English teacher. She has loved literature ever since she was in school, which led her to study it in depth during her English Philology BA degree at Sofia University. She is currently finishing her studies in the MA program Communication: Language, Literature, Media at Sofia University. Zlatomira is one of the winners of the PEN/Heim 2024 Translation Fund Grant for her translation of The Other Dream by Vladimir Poleganov. She has translated texts by contemporary Bulgarian authors, such as Petya Kokudeva, Yanitsa Radeva, and Nevena Mitropolitska.

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Dalibor Plečić

Dalibor Plečić was born in 1979 and studied General and Comparative Literature in Skopje, as well as Library Studies and Information Science in Belgrade. He is a book reviewer for Booksa, Beton, and The Literary Review magazines from Croatia, Serbia, and the USA. He has been translating short stories from several Bulgarian writers into Serbian (including Peter Dentchev‘s Stories from The Past), as well as novels, essays, and theatre plays from Macedonian and English into Serbian, and from Serbian and Croatian into Macedonian (including Tekst, tijelo, trauma. Andrea Zlatar). Plečić has authored a book of short stories (Bunike), together with poems and essays on science fiction in literature. Since 2018, he has been one of the editors of the Cultural and Art Magazine Zenit from Strumica. Plečić also is also a high school teacher of literature.

Jasmina Jovanović

Jasmina Jovanović (1969) is based in Belgrade, Serbia. She holds a Bachelor`s degree in Bulgarian Philology and a Master`s degree in Literary Studies. Presently she teaches Bulgarian Literature, Practical Language and Literary Translation at the same university. Jasmina has been a practicing literary translator for more than 20 years and has translated Bulgarian writers such as Boris Hristov, Svetlana Dicheva, Milen Ruskov, Inna Valchanova, Deyan Enev, Zdravka Evtimova, Miroslav Penkov, Yana Boukova, Dilyan Benev, Georgi Gospodinov and several stories by Elena Alexieva, Georgi Mishev, Kalin Terziyski etc., published in literary periodicals. In 2023 Jasmina received the award of the Serbian Association of Literary Translators for her work on Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov.

Marija Joanna Stojadinovic

Marija-Joanna Stojadinović (1951) graduatеd from the Belgrade Music Academy and specialized theatre journalism. She has worked as a radio journalist and published numerous articles in magazines and daily newspapers in Bulgaria, former Yugoslavia and Serbia. She has also participated in numerous conferences. Since 1978 she has been actively translating literature from Serbian to Bulgarian and vice versa. She has translated works by over 50 authors and around 100 titles, among them works by Dušan Kovačević, Momo Kapor, Vladislav Bajac, Drago Jančar, Dragan Velikić, Gordana Ćirjanić, Valeri Petrov, Ekatarina Yosifova, Georgi Gospodinov, Alek Popov, Anton Strashimirov, Ivan Vazov, Yordan Yovkov, Georgi Borisov. Marija Joanna is a a member of the Association of Literary Translators of Serbia and the Association of Journalists in Bulgaria. She has been residing in Belgrade since 1971.

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