About

I was born in Sofia and have never left it for long. [to be continued]

Bulgarian, English, Spanish, Italian, French, Neapolitan and Macedonian. I translate published books out of English and Spanish; the rest I keep open, because a language you stop using closes quietly and without warning.

Neapolitan is not an exercise in the exotic. I arrived at it through Ferrante, where dialect is not decoration but a social border — her characters switch into Italian when they want to rise, and fall back into Neapolitan when they lose their temper. If you cannot hear that, you have not read the book, only its plot.

I am a book editor, and translation runs alongside it — although “alongside” is an inaccurate word for something that takes up this many hours.

Editing is work that only gets noticed when it has been done badly. If I have done mine, the reader will not think of me once — they will assume the book always sounded like this.

Seven titles have gone through my hands so far — five in translation, two in editing: an unsolved puzzle from 1934, a climate novel, a book about the brain, a manual for exhausted parents, two children's books and one from the Spanish.

Books, languages, nature, and now and then something I cannot keep quiet about. I am drawn to long timescales: a forest planted for books that will not be printed until 2114; turtles that come back to lay their eggs on the exact beach where they hatched; a beach that went from slaughterhouse to sanctuary in thirty years, because somebody sat down and talked to the people who live there.

I have not been yet. 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. [to be continued]

My favourite film is Into the Wild — for the life lived in tune with nature, for the comfort of being on your own, and for the courage it takes to actually do it.

My favourite flower is lantana, which changes colour while it blooms — that strikes me as honest. I am a Virgo, which probably explains the editing. [to be continued]