Biography
Miroslav Penkov was born in 1982 in
Gabrovo, Bulgaria. When he was four, his family moved to the capital city of Sofia,
where he graduated from First English Language High School. He
moved to America in 2001 and completed a bachelor's degree in
Psychology, followed by an MFA in Creative Writing at the University
of Arkansas.
His stories, translated in over twenty languages, have won the BBC International Short Story Award 2012
and The Southern Review’s Eudora Welty Prize and have
appeared in A Public Space, Granta, One
Story, Orion, The Sunday Times, The Best American
Short Stories 2008, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012, The Best
American Nonrequired Reading 2013.
EAST OF THE WEST, his first book, was published in the
U.S. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and in
seventeen other countries.
It was a finalist for the 2012 William Saroyan International Prize
for Writing and the Steven Turner Award for First Fiction by the
Texas Institute of Letters.
In Bulgaria his own translation of the stories was published by Ciela under the title
На
изток от
Запада and became
the #1 best-selling Bulgarian book of 2012.
In 2014-15, Miroslav was mentored by Michael Ondaatje as part of
the
Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.
His debut novel, STORK MOUNTAIN, written in English and Bulgarian, was published in 2016 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US, by Sceptre in the UK and by Ciela in Bulgaria under the title Щъркелите и планината.
His story
"A Picture With Yuki" was made into a feature film. A
Bulgarian-Japanese co-production, the film was directed by Luchezar
Avramov and starred Kiki Sugino, Ruscen Vidinliev, Dimiter Marinov (Green
Book), and Bulgarian Olympic boxing legend Serafim Todorov. The
film premiered at the Sofia International Film Festival in March
2019 where it received the Audience Award for films from the
International and the Balkan competitions.
Miroslav is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of
North Texas.
Contact
mpenkov@gmail.com
Literary Agent:
Nicole Aragi
(212) 675-8353
connect@aragi.net
For inquires regarding
East of the West:
Sorche Fairbank
(617) 576-0030
queries@fairbankliterary.com