Balkan traditional music has the peculiar quality to move even people who are anyway not much into what used to be called world music. It somehow gets inside you, infects you with its madness, and makes you dance and cry with the joy and the sadness, which you usually prefer to keep hidden even from yourself.
This is the second Krastan Dyankov Award for Vasileva, who won the prize in 2008. Vasileva is among the finest English-language literature translators in recent decades. She has worked on more than 55 literature pieces by James Joyce, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, Somerset Maugham and others.
The special prize went to Aglika Markova for her translation of Life According to Lubka by Laurie Graham.
What better way to celebrate the Bulgarian alphabet on 24 May than bringing Bulgarian writers together with their international counterparts? In the spirit of Cyril and Methodius, the original pioneers of Slavic literacy, the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation hosted its first annual summer fiction-writing seminar in Sozopol in May 2008.