CULTURE

EXAMINING YOUR DARK SIDE

She's the former manageress of a special café for mentally ill people (that enjoyed protected status), a property consultant who uses her background as a psychotherapist to help clients and a journalist who writes about real estate. And, as if this wasn't enough, she's also written two books. It may sound like an exhausting remit but Stanislava Ciurinskiene copes with her diverse roles admirably well. “They complement each other,” she says. “I became interested in psychology because I wanted to know more about myself.

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OUT OF THE LIMELIGHT

In spite of winning the 2006 Helicon Award for modern prose, Elena Alexieva is honest enough to admit that her dog is her biggest fan. "It doesn't need to read my books to love me," she says. The award for her short story collection, Reading Group 31, briefly placed her in the limelight. But Elena quickly and gladly withdrew from it because, according to her, the Bulgarian spotlight is too small. "It shines like a table lamp and is not worth the effort," she says. Instead, her job as a simultaneous interpreter continues to keep her busy, travelling throughout Bulgaria.

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THE TALENTED MR MOUDOV

Ivan Moudov, a young contemporary artist, looks like a man capable of smoking his wife's cigarettes after painstakingly cutting the filter tip off each of them - in secret. Not because she would mind, but because he made a bet that he wouldn't smoke for six years, and still has five to go.

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SWISS PORTRAITS OF BULGARIAN COUPLES

It all began with an email I received in the summer of 2005. I was impressed by something Sava Hlavacek wrote when asking for assistance in taking photos in Bulgaria. “Bulgaria is one of the least known countries in Europe. No events from Bulgarian history have become part of European consciousness.”

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MAKING THE RIGHT MOVES

Georgi Etimov was born in 1963 in Sofia and graduated in civil engineering, a vocation that runs in the family: both his father and grandfather were engineers. He worked as one for a good part of his life, and is married to an architect. Given this background, you would be correct in thinking he would have a strong opinion on the recent construction boom. “Things are not just black and white. There are contractors who go for quality in everything they do, and there are of course the others who make all kinds of compromises.

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FACE OFF

Bulgaria has many faces. The shadowy thick set jaw of corruption glimpsed behind the blacked out windows of a Mercedes 4x4; the peroxide hair and pouting lips of chalga writhing in seductive flashes of naked flesh; the ruddy-cheeked countenance of folk gaily picking rose petals in the fields of the Socialist dream.

Painter Henrik Engstrom, or "HEN", became fascinated with these last two when, flicking through the TV channels in his native Stockholm, he came across some Bulgarian TV stations.

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ADVENTURES IN POST-COMMUNISM

These figures from the dark underbelly of society seem strangely at odds with the dashing, yet unassuming person of British journalist John Hamilton. But beneath the quintessential English chap lie nerves of steel – “I always get very nervous before interviews,” Hamilton bashfully admits before revealing that his most nerve wracking experience was interviewing an Albanian drug lord whose pizza joint had just been blown up by a rocket propelled grenade.

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KRISTIN DIMITROVA

You may know the name if you are interested in modern Balkan literature. You may have read her short stories or poetry in anthologies and literary journals in Britain, Ireland and the United States; Selected, a trilingual volume in Bulgarian, Greek and English; or A Visit to the Clockmaker, a book of verse published in Cork, Eire.

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ALEK POPOV'S MISSION LONDON

Alek Popov is a leading figure on Bulgaria's contemporary literature scene. Having written numerous award-winning short stories and scripts, which have been translated into over a dozen languages, Mission London is his first novel. In a style "something like Pulp Fiction," it tackles the behaviour of Bulgaria's new elite on the eve of accession.

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