📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Saturday 27 June
Today belongs to a living writer rather than a long-dead one, which makes a nice change. Emanuil A. Vidinski was born in June 1978, and the date records place his birthday today. His surname comes from Vidin, the Danube town in Bulgaria's far northwest where he was born.
Who Emanuil Vidinski is
Vidinski is one of those genuinely multi-disciplinary Bulgarian cultural figures who do not map neatly onto a single British job title. He is a writer, poet and musician, and he has spent his career moving between all three.
The books came first to most readers. His collection of short stories, Cartographies of Escape (2005), was one of six titles shortlisted for the Elias Canetti Award that year, and he followed it with the novel Places to Breathe (2008). He had already won the Rashko Sugarev Award in 2004 for a short story called "4th of October", and picked up a second prize in 2009 for another, "Egon and the silence", at a short fiction competition organized by Balkani publishing house and OBB. Along the way he has written for the serious end of the Bulgarian press, the newspapers Kultura and the Literary Newspaper and the magazine Capital Light among them, and co-founded a humanities seminar devoted to Thomas Mann, Dostoevsky and the Bulgarian modernist Tchavdar Mutafov.
Then there is the music. In 2004, the poets Ivan Hristov and Petar Tchouhov founded an ethno-rock poetry band called Gologan, which is exactly the sort of thing that does not have a tidy British equivalent and is all the better for it. Vidinski joined later and left in 2006. He also wrote a music column, fittingly titled "Musaic", for the Literary Newspaper.
The editing is the third strand. He ran a "World Novels" book series at the Altera publishing house, worked as host and editor in the Bulgarian section of radio Deutsche Welle (1990–2012), and became editor-in-chief of Panorama Magazine. His own work has been translated into English, German, Hungarian, Croatian and Spanish.
Why this is useful to a British expat
Here is the practical bit. Most of us arrive in Bulgaria knowing precisely nothing about its contemporary literature, partly because so little of it reaches English. Vidinski is one of the exceptions: his work has been translated, which means a curious British reader can actually go and read a living Bulgarian author rather than just nodding politely when the subject comes up. Start with the short fiction if you want a way in.
And if you would rather hear the culture than read it, the ethno-rock-and-poetry corner he helped build is a small, rewarding rabbit hole. Either route is a more interesting evening than another box set, and it is the kind of thing that slowly turns living in a country into actually knowing it.