About

I was born in Sofia and have never left it for long — but I have travelled to more than ten countries and do not intend to stop until it is a hundred and ninety-five.

Bulgarian, English, Spanish, Italian, French, Neapolitan, Catalan and Macedonian. I can read Arabic too. From English, Spanish and Italian I have published book translations. From Spanish I have interpreted for the author Oriol Canosa during his visit for Reading Day 2025. The other languages I treat as a hobby — for now.

Neapolitan, by the way, is not some exercise in the exotic. I came to it through Ferrante and her quartet, four books I feel extremely close to and which you can hear me talk about rather often.

I am a book editor, and translation runs alongside it — although “alongside” is an inaccurate word for something that takes up this many hours. But as they say: when you love doing something, you do not experience it as work.

Editing is generally work that only gets noticed when it has been done badly. Translation too, to a degree. But my job is for the reader not to think of me once, and to assume the book always sounded this perfect.

Fifteen titles have gone through my hands in translation so far: an unsolved puzzle from 1934, a novel about climate change, two books about the brain and one about hormones, several children's titles including Zadie Smith's Weirdo books, part of a non-fiction book about Marie Curie, and my favourite project — the translation from Bulgarian into Spanish of Vladimir Poleganov's “The Deconstruction of Thomas S.”, for which I am still looking for a publisher abroad.

I have a bachelor's in publishing and a master's from the Translator-Editor programme.

The thesis I defended for my bachelor's degree was titled “The use and reception of forensic terminology and criminal slang in Bulgarian and Mexican media”. I looked at how the forensic professiolect and criminal slang shape the public image of criminals, in the context of journalistic practice in Bulgaria and in Mexico.

Books, languages, nature, film — culture, broadly — and now and then social subjects I cannot keep to myself. Lately it is mostly book reviews.

My favourite film is Into the Wild, after Jon Krakauer's book — for the idea of a life lived in tune with nature, for the comfort of being alone but not lonely, and for the courage it takes to actually do it.

My favourite flower is lantana, which changes colour while it blooms and unseated the hydrangea from first place quite convincingly — though at least, if I get my Lorelai moment in this life, it will be with cheaper flowers for Max.

I am a Virgo, which probably explains why I fell for the perfectionist trade called editing.

I make things out of clay, I dance now and then, I like spending time out in the wild, and I like being hopeless at every sport I take up with enthusiasm.

My favourite piece of work so far, and the one I am proudest of because I could see how far I had come since my bachelor's, is my paper “Gravity’s Rainbow”, or the Socialmedia-esque Fall in the Rabbit Hole of “Mindless Pleasures” — on reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as a kind of scrolling through social media, for the course Narratology: cognitive and semiotic models; operative linguistics.

My biggest dream is to visit Mexico. I have written about the turtles of Oaxaca, about Mexico City sinking twenty-five centimetres a year, and about the three hundred and seventy languages of Latin America.