Who was Kina Kadreva?

A Bulgarian children's writer, poet and editor, born in Burgas on 27 September 1931 and died on 27 July 2020. She studied Bulgarian philology at Sofia University and edited the long-running children's television slot Leka nosht, detsa! Her tales appear in Bulgarian primary school textbooks.

What is Leka nosht, detsa!?

A nightly children's slot on Bulgarian National Television, the last thing on before bed for generations of Bulgarian children. Kadreva wrote and edited its bedtime tales, television plays and verses.

Is any of her work in English?

Very little. The English Wikipedia entry runs to a few lines and lists two titles. Bulgarian children's literature has travelled poorly, which is a shame, and the practical route in is a Bulgarian edition read alongside a child.

On This Day in Bulgaria: Kina Kadreva, Who Wrote the Nation's Bedtime (27 September), Shumen.UK

📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Sunday 27 September

If your children are in Bulgarian school, they have almost certainly read her, and if your Bulgarian neighbours are over thirty they were put to bed by her. Kina Kadreva was born on this date in 1931, and for years she edited the programme that ended the day for every child in the country.

What happened on this day

Kina Hristova Kadreva was born in Burgas and grew up on Petko Slaveykov, Ivan Vazov and Dora Gabe. She wrote her first poem in the third class, aged nine. At school in Burgas she knew two boys who would become the composer Toncho Rusev and the poet Hristo Fotev, which is a remarkable amount of talent for one seaside town.

She read Bulgarian philology at Sofia University and turned to children's tales. Her first two books were signed for print by the novelist Emiliyan Stanev. Her third, "Zaycheto i mencheto", went to the poet Leda Mileva as editor, who was impressed enough that when she later became director of Bulgarian National Television she brought Kadreva in to edit "Leka nosht, detsa!", the nightly children's slot. Kadreva wrote its bedtime tales, its scripts, its small comic verses. One of her ideas was a run of her stories read aloud by Nevena Kokanova, who was about as famous as Bulgarian actresses got.

She was clear about what she was doing. Her tales, she said, were contemporary rather than folk: everything can be the subject of a tale, the plots are everywhere, and she simply reached out and caught them. In 1994 the book "Prikazka za palavoto skakalche" put her on the honour list of the International Board on Books for Young People, the UNESCO-linked body, and in 2011 Sliven gave her its Konstantin Konstantinov award for lifetime work. She wrote for adults too, and published theoretical studies on how imagination is built in a child. She died on 27 July 2020.

Towns celebrating today

Dimovo in the far north-west marks its day. It is a small place, a little over a thousand people, thirty kilometres from Vidin on the Danube and fifty from the Serbian border at the Timok, in the corner of Bulgaria that sees fewest visitors of any.

Why this matters for British expats

"Leka nosht, detsa!" occupies roughly the place in Bulgarian memory that Watch with Mother or Jackanory hold in British memory: a fixed point at the end of the day that an entire generation shared, and a reliable way to make someone in their fifties suddenly nostalgic. Knowing it exists, and knowing who wrote for it, is worth more in conversation than a good deal of history.

The practical version is simpler. Kadreva's tales are set texts in the Bulgarian primary curriculum, so if you have children in the local school system her work will come home in a reading book sooner or later. Reading it with them is not a bad way to pick up the language yourself, since the vocabulary is small, the sentences are short and somebody has already decided the story is worth hearing twice.

File alongside this in your expat mental map: the Shumen.UK health guide.

Sources and further reading

The Burgas childhood, the route into television and the full bibliography come from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Kina Kadreva; the English entry is a stub of a few lines by comparison, which is itself a fair measure of how little of Bulgarian children's writing has travelled.