Could you tell us about the inspirations behind She Who Remains?  

I grew up in a village in northern Bulgaria where old patriarchal laws could still very much be felt in the air. I had an inner calling to tell my story – that of a hypersensitive girl growing up in a world imbued with domineering masculine energy.  

I’ve known the story I wanted to tell for a long time but I couldn’t find the characters with which to tell the story, until I visited a photo exhibition in Sofia by the German-based Bulgarian photographer Pepa Hristova, which was devoted to the sworn virgins of Albania. I was immediately moved by these seemingly androgynous human beings whose female energy was supposed to be wiped out of them. And yet, I saw a certain softness in their eyes.   

How did you go about writing the novel? 

I spent two years researching sworn virgins. The books of Ismail Kadare helped me immensely in familiarising myself with their very particular world. I watched interviews and documentaries and probed deeply in books about the meanings of their names, as I believe that the names of the characters always mirror their fate.  

The actual writing of the book took me only two months. The ‘voice’ appeared suddenly and told the story in a single breath, it dug through my wounds, defied rules (no formal sentence structure, no capitalisation, no quotation marks), and it flowed out of me like a river – without edits – a pure transcription of an entire world I felt entrusted to reveal. It was a painful but also very healing process for me. 

The theme of this year’s International Booker Prize is ‘Fiction beyond borders’ – how do you think translated fiction helps readers see beyond geographical boundaries, and why is that important?  

I think that in a world of turbulence, wars, abuse and intense polarisation, translated fiction is the most powerful and truthful evidence of ‘the other’. It can let us not only see beyond geographical boundaries but also beyond the stereotypes the world has created. Thanks to this literature the reader can enter the sacred world of others, experience their family traumas, their love, their fears, and become part of a shared human story. 

For me, translated fiction is like ‘the fool’ in the room who tells the truth through his tales and jokes. Thanks to him the readers realise that their way of seeing the world is only one possibility among many and that all humans are all connected by a shared emotional foundation. That we have a collective soul. 

The International Booker Prize is celebrating its 10th birthday in its current form this year – how do you think the award has changed the perception of translated fiction over the last decade? 

I’ve been following the Booker nominations and awards with great interest over the last few years, and what I’ve noticed, especially in the recent years, is that the nomination lists and the awarded books include authors and translators from a wide variety of countries and languages, including smaller countries. This encourages readers to explore books from lesser-explored corners of the literary world, and creates life for these books within global literature.  

I think also that the International Booker Prize has had a huge impact on the smaller publishing houses and has encouraged them to take more risks and to publish more literature from smaller countries, which is so important.  

Translators are also impacted – they’ve become so much more visible and people have gained a much deeper understanding of their role in the realm of literature – which is indispensable. 

Could you tell us about a book that made you fall in love with reading as a child?  

The first novel I read in my childhood was The Sea-Hawk from Rafael Sabatini, an adventurous saga which revealed to me the infinitely powerful world of imagination. Reading it as a child, it dawned on me that books were a way to experience ‘visions’ – to see people and places that didn’t exist, but took me on a journey nonetheless.  

That book became a parallel world for me. A world I could visit whenever I wanted, where I could be whoever I wanted. Holding the book in my hands, even without opening it and reading it, I had the feeling of peacefulness.  

I feel the same now too. I keep a pile of books on my bedside table, and every night, even when I am too tired to read, the feeling of having them there fills me with peace, like I can fall asleep because my book-guardians will watch over me.   

And could you tell us about a book that made you want to become a writer? 

I can’t say if there’s one particular book that inspired me to become a writer, but I can say that all the books on our bookshelves at home that were within reach when I was a child made me daydream and de facto made me want to become a writer.  

I think that it’s never too late for a certain book to come into your life and inspire you to be a writer. Sometimes my inner critic is so loud that I’m incapable of hearing my inner voice. But then I’ll open a favourite book, I’ll read it and wait for the miracle to happen. This inspires me, my fears disappear and the writer in me resurrects with her most truthful voice.  

Isn’t it the same with the fear of death? We are doomed to fight this fear every day. And the books are here to help us again, not to fight against it, but to forget it. To withstand it. Even if only for a while. 

Is there a book that changed the way you think about the world?  

Every good book which I read makes me see the world in a different way. I think that this is the power of literature – to change perspectives and put you in the shoes of another human being. For example, Reading Lolita in Tehran from Azar Nafisi, in Vanya Tomova’s Bulgarian translation, is one of the books that made me value my life as a free woman who is free to read whatever she likes.    

I also think that attention is the new currency. Everything and everybody is fighting for our attention. We can hardly keep our eyes on a longer text because of how we’re bombarded with information coming through the televisions and our screens. I strongly believe that the books can be our saviours here. They can truly save our lives and help our brains create new neurons, reduce our anxiety in this fast life, cultivate our attention and the most important thing – they can bring us back to the present moment: the place where life really happens. 

Which book written in Bulgarian should everyone read? 

Ballad for Georg Henig from Viktor Paskov. I think anyone who wishes to understand what true sacrifice and true love mean must read it. This is my favourite Bulgarian book which is a tribute to lost values and the power of human kindness.  

We need books like this now more than ever as our world is getting harsher and harsher and our values are moving backward rather than forward. I believe that if beauty doesn’t save the world, books will. 

And, finally, which International Booker-nominated book do you think everyone should read?   

Crooked Plow from Itamar Vieira Junior, translated into English by Johnny Lorenz. The book explores the lives of subsistence farmers in the neglected hinterlands of Bahia in Brazil. I was so moved by this story that I read the novel twice and was fortunate enough to meet with Itamar this year.    

A book can inspire not only one person, but an entire nation, and is, I very much believe, capable of drastically affecting change: political and societal. This is exactly what Crooked Plow did in Brazil by giving voice to the voiceless and becoming a symbol of their movements and strikes for equal rights. 

What it was about She Who Remains that made you want to translate it? 

It met me at the right time. The book felt like an absolute spell and it was strikingly innovative, not just stylistically but also in how it explored gender, family, queer love, villains, even God. I had such intense chemistry with this text that translating it felt like a calling and I sank my teeth into it. Another translator would have had to pry it from my cold, dead hands.  

Joking aside, I feel supremely lucky to be part of this project (major shoutout to Rene’s agent, Gergana, for sending it to me), because a book like this comes once in a generation, and Rene’s trust in me to render her words has been one of the profound joys of my creative life. 

How did you go about translating the book? 

She Who Remains demanded everything of me, and I gave it everything I had. Rene talks about it pouring out of her in two months and it was kind of the same for me. I felt like I was sharing a nervous system with her as I translated it, and I pretty much blacked out.  

I do remember thinking ‘Man, this is really hard, but it’s the best thing I’ve ever worked on.’ I really had to rise above myself, let myself be carried, tune my ear to trauma and survival, and render it not just in an English that’s timeless but in a way that allowed for the text to reverberate in a deeply Balkan way. There was also very much a sense of complicity for me thematically – what it means to remain when everything else falls away.   

The theme of this year’s International Booker Prize is ‘Fiction beyond borders’ – how do you think translated fiction helps readers see beyond geographical boundaries, and why is that important?  

There is a strain of literary gatekeeping, especially when it comes to literature from minority languages, that is a form of cultural border patrolling. I’ve written about cultural trade deficits before, but I think it’s worth saying again – we don’t need another New York divorce memoir. Truly, we don’t.  

Fiction that has travelled beyond borders puts us into a visceral conversation with our fellow humans, it enables us to metabolise a different turn of phrase, a way of looking at the world. I think that, equally, a translated book is an opportunity to hold the source and the target cultures accountable. When a text has travelled, we need to look at the context that gave birth to it.  

Rene’s book – an epic story of forbidden queer love – was a major critical and commercial success in Bulgaria (and outside of it, too). But gay marriage is still banned in Bulgaria, let us not forget this. So, the conversations we have around art are, to me, just as important as the art. These conversations cannot happen if the gates are not open for literature from small countries. 

The International Booker Prize is celebrating its 10th birthday in its current form this year – how do you think the award has changed the perception of translated fiction over the last decade?  

I just love how the International Booker longlist has completely overridden the inherent flaws and biases in publishing and criticism and in the process has changed the trajectories of authors and translators and small publishers.  

Just like any translation, each longlist is a statement: political, social, cultural, linguistic. Here, pay attention to this. What the International Booker Prize has done to bring attention to minority languages and small presses –  and the kind of literature that the mainstream media would otherwise sleep on –  cannot be overstated.   

Could you tell us about a book that made you fall in love with reading as a child?  

When I think of the books of my childhood, I think of Charlie Chaplin’s My Autobiography, in Vesselin Izmirliev’s Bulgarian translation. I think of Elin Pelin’s Ian Bibian in the original Bulgarian and Erich Kästner’s Das doppelte Lottchen and Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking, in Vera Gancheva’s beautiful Bulgarian translation from Swedish.  

But I also remember my parents’ books, many of which had also travelled: the red leather–bound Dumas volumes in our bookcase, not in French or Bulgarian, but in Russian. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago – smuggled in from Russia by a neighbour. Yesenin in Russian. Wodehouse in Bulgarian. Chudomir in the original Bulgarian. We couldn’t really leave Bulgaria in the 1980s but the whole world was right there in our living room.   

And could you tell us about a book that made you want to become a translator?  

I’m not sure it’s that simple. I’m an essayist and a memoirist first and my work interrogates corrupt systems, artistic freedom, the self, the complex interiority of women, father-daughter relationships and displacement. Translation developed alongside my nonfiction writing, both as a way to work on books that echoed those same preoccupations and to make sense of my life as a Bulgarian immigrant in Chicago.  

I don’t write fiction but I can translate it and that feels very powerful. But if there was one person who inspired me to translate, that would be Clive James. Asked once by The New York Times what the funniest book he’d ever read was, he pointed to Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, then added: ‘Is there some Bulgarian equivalent, languishing untranslated? Probably not.’ He perhaps underestimated the vast capacity of a Bulgarian to get offended and hold a grudge because it’s been 13 years since that interview and now here we are. So thank you, Clive James. 

Is there a translator whose work you always look out for?  

I devour Martin Aitken’s translations from Norwegian of Hanne Ørstavik’s beautiful books as soon as they come out. I can’t wait for Ekaterina Petrova’s translation from Bulgarian of Iana Boukova’s masterpiece Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow, due this year.  

I love it anytime the brilliant translators in my Chicago-based Third Coast Translators Collective publish, which is often! This year alone we have books coming from Denise Kripper (Argentine Spanish), Ali Kinsella (Ukranian), Kevin Gerry Dunn (Spanish), and Susanna Lang (French), to name a few.  

And, naturally, I also love it when my fellow translators write books. I loved Bruna Dantas Lobado’s Blue Light Hours, and I can’t wait for Jennifer Croft’s new memoir, Notes on Postcards. 

Is there a work of fiction originally written in Bulgarian that you’d recommend to English-language readers? 

Yordanka Beleva’s collection of stories Keder (Turkish for sorrow). Dana’s writing has been called ‘reminiscent of early Tokarczuk’ and if there’s such a thing as Bulgarian magical realism, this might be it. Her short story ‘Amen’ to me is pure brilliance. She strikes this really great balance between compression and vastness, being political without being preachy, being godly without being sermonic.  

I find her style rare and beguiling and sophisticated. Back when this collection first came out in Bulgaria, the prominent Bulgarian literary critic Mitko Novkov predicted her stories ‘like haikus, yet trained on our social milieu, will come to reinvent Bulgarian storytelling’. 

And, finally, which International Booker-nominated book do you think everyone should read?  

Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness in My Mind, in Ekin Oklap’s absolutely gorgeous translation from Turkish.