Tsvetanka Elenkova

Tsvetanka Elenkova was born in Sofia in 1968. She has published six poetry collections and two books of essays, Time and Relation and Bulgarian Frescos: Feast of the Root.

Her poetry has been translated in more than twenty languages. Her poetry collection The Seventh Gesture has appeared in English, French, Serbian and Spanish translations and Crookedness in English and French translations. Her work has appeared in the magazines Absinthe, ILQ, MPT, New Humanist, Orient Express, Poem, Poetry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Zoland Poetry and Europe among others.
She has been a guest at numerous literary festivals, including Čortanovci (Serbia), Crowd Omnibus (Germany), Lodève (France), Poeteka (Albania), Struga (Macedonia), Tinos (Greece) and Vilenica (Slovenia), and taken part in translation workshops in Istanbul (Turkey). She has edited the anthology At the End of the World: Contemporary Poetry from Bulgaria together with the magazines Ah Maria and Europe 2001 in Bulgaria and Helios in Greece. Crookedness has been nominated for the Ivan Nikolov National Prize for Poetry, her translation of Speaking of Siva for the Hristo G. Danov National Award and her last poetry book The Seventh Gesture II was nominated for the Ivan Nikolov National Prize for Poetry and The National Poetry Award Nikolai Kanchev. In 2019 she received the prestigious literary award Pencho’s Oak for the body of her work. In 2022 she received the English PEN Award for her book Magnification Forty. Her translations include poetry by Raymond Carver, Rosalía de Castro, Bogomil Gjuzel, Chus Pato, Lois Pereiro, Manuel Rivas and Fiona Sampson. She is a doctoral student in theology at Sofia University, working on mysticism in the poetry of St Gregory of Nazianzus, and editorial director of the publishing house Small Stations Press.