Most British expats will never have heard of Vanya Petkova, and plenty of Bulgarians under forty would struggle to name one of her poems. That is a genuine shame, because she led one of the most improbable lives of any writer this country produced, and she was born in Sofia on this date in 1944.
What happened on this day
Vanya Petkova arrived on 10 July 1944, registered as Ivana Petkova Petkova (Vanya is the everyday short form of Ivana). She grew up to read Slavic philology at Sofia University, then went off to Havana for a postgraduate degree in Spanish and Latin American culture at the University José Martí, which already tells you she was never going to settle into being a quiet provincial poet.
Over the following four decades she produced an enormous body of work, some 27 poetry collections and a shelf of prose, and she worked in seven languages. She also did something almost no ordinary Bulgarian could do under communism: she lived abroad, for years at a time, in Sudan, Cuba, Syria and Ukraine. Her debut, Солени ветрове (Salty Winds), appeared in 1965 when she was twenty-one. For a citizen of a state that treated a passport as a privilege to be rationed, that itinerary reads less like a poet's CV and more like a quiet act of defiance.
The authorities noticed. Her 1967 collection Грешница (Sinners) was pulled for being too sensual for official taste, and only reappeared the next year after Lyudmila Zhivkova, the powerful daughter of the communist leader and effectively the country's culture supremo, stepped in. Her marriage to a Nubian scientist earned her official disapproval at home. And her very last collection, Pirate Poems, published in the year she died, was dedicated, with a completely straight face, to Johnny Depp.
Petkova died on 26 April 2009 in Parvomay, near Plovdiv, and is buried in Sofia. In 2025 the Bulgarian Writers' Union set up a national poetry prize in her name, which is the kind of posthumous rehabilitation the awkward, difficult, interesting writers usually have to wait a long time for.
Why this matters for British expats
You will not trip over a Vanya Petkova statue on the way to the market, and there is no name day or festival pinned to today. What she offers instead is a small correction to a lazy assumption a lot of us bring with us: that life behind the Iron Curtain was uniformly grey and closed. Here is a woman who wrote openly about desire, married across a colour line the state disapproved of, counted the Soviet poet Yevtushenko among her acquaintances, and once read her poems aloud on aeroplanes. Knowing she existed makes the country you have moved to feel a little less flat.
There is no Shumen chapter to her story; she was a Sofia woman who spent her life on the move. But her books are exactly the sort of thing that fills the Bulgarian-literature shelves of the regional library and turns up on the reading lists at Shumen's Konstantin Preslavsky University, where the philology students who will teach the next generation actually study her. If you want one concrete thing to do with this, ask a Bulgarian friend who reads whether they rate her. You will get an opinion, and very possibly a story.
Sources and further reading
This piece draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia biography of Ваня Петкова, which is fuller than the English one, for her dates, the list of collections and the details of her years abroad. If you can find any of her work in English translation it is worth seeking out, because a poet with a biography like this does not tend to write dull poems.