Every year, France, Japan, Brazil and more crown their best book. Spin the globe to see which ones you can read in English, and which are still waiting.
4,667 books · 44 prizes · 39 countries
Helikon 2025 · Winner
Pod mesechinata, ogromna kato tikva
Title translated by AI:“Under the Moon, Huge as a Pumpkin”
Novel · 432 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:At the turn of the twentieth century two boys are born in the small village of Zanovets in Macedonia; their childhood friendship turns into a lifelong rivalry, told over a single day that holds two lives and half a century.
Helikon 2025 · Nominee
Silueti v Yaponia
Title translated by AI:“Silhouettes in Japan”
Short stories · 184 pages
AI-generated summary:In Kyoto a boy from Okinawa touches an eel and his life splits in two, in Osaka a young woman finds herself again after rejecting the kimono, and in snowy Aomori a parade of mythical figures colours the night.
Helikon 2025 · Nominee
Bolkata idva po-kasno
Antonia Apostolova · 48 when first published
Novel · 528 pages · Family, Autofiction, Love
AI-generated summary:A man who has left his family for good starts writing a letter to his first and only son after the woman he lives with loses their child, and it turns into a confession about his ancestors, his families, his brother and the one woman he should not have.
Helikon 2025 · Nominee
Ubiystvo na bulevard „Stamboliyski“
Title translated by AI:“Murder on Stamboliyski Boulevard”
Chavdar Tsenov · 68 when first published
Novel · 232 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:Through the portraits of its many characters and their stories, a murder on Stamboliyski Boulevard opens a picture of present-day Bulgaria, divided, uncertain and hungry for big ideas.
Helikon 2025 · Nominee
Adazhio za Maria
Georgi Bardarov · 52 when first published
Novel · 502 pages · Love, Historical
AI-generated summary:Vangel and Maria fight all their lives for a deep love that passes through upheavals, historical events and turns of fate.
Helikon 2025 · Nominee
Posledniyat voynishki imperator
Title translated by AI:“The Last Soldier Emperor”
Novel · 144 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Vasil Strandzhev, known among treasure hunters as the Emperor, collects gold aurei of the Roman soldier emperors of 235–285, and must use rare skills to make his way through the turbulent twentieth century.
Helikon 2025 · Nominee
Tezeyat v svoya labirint
Title translated by AI:“Theseus in His Labyrinth”
Krasimir Dimovski · 63 when first published
Novel · 320 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Theseus, an uneducated but sharp-witted man, is thrown into a labyrinth of events by questions such as what would happen if God were a girl and whether to save someone who does not want to be saved.
Helikon 2025 · Nominee
Rodinia
Nikolay Terziyski · 42 when first published
Novel · 306 pages
AI-generated summary:Sixteen short stories, linked by shared characters and a common horizon, follow people scattered across the wide world on journeys out and back, guided by a memory that keeps leading them even when they have stopped remembering.
Helikon 2025 · Nominee
Nagore po rekata nazad
Title translated by AI:“Upriver Backwards”
Plamen Antov · 60 when first published
Short stories · 228 pages
AI-generated summary:Densely written stories, tied together by hidden repetitions and a dialogue between them, that travel less through places than back through time, drawing the reader into an adventure along the maps of thought.
Helikon 2025 · Nominee
Panspermia
Novel · 236 pages
AI-generated summary:A novel told entirely through reviews of forty books that do not exist but could, crossed by recurring figures such as Simon Logos and Polin, which slowly reveal how humankind lets artificial intelligence push it aside.
Helikon 2025 · Nominee
I legloto ni e zelenina
Title translated by AI:“And Our Bed Is Green”
Novel · 429 pages
AI-generated summary:Born in 1893 in a village in Ottoman Macedonia, Ivan Klyandov, the potter's eldest son, becomes a husband and father almost as a child, and trouble over his part in revolutionary committee work soon forces him to flee to America.
Helikon 2025 · Nominee
Bozhiyata milost
Title translated by AI:“God's Mercy”
Yordanka Beleva · 48 when first published
Short stories · 100 pages
AI-generated summary:Short stories, most told by a girl growing up in a small town close to her grandparents, where quarrels between her parents, family shame and death break into a seemingly cosy childhood.
Helikon 2024 · Winner
Градинарят и смъртта · Gradinaryat i smartta
Georgi Gospodinov · 56 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A son tells the story of his father, a gardener who is now a garden, a man who carried tons of the past on his shoulders and never stopped telling it, and of their last dawn together.
Helikon 2024 · Nominee
Chakalnyata
Title translated by AI:“The Waiting Room”
Novel · 132 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:When her mother is diagnosed with cancer, a daughter becomes her companion through tests, treatments and hospital waiting rooms, hiding her own fear while trying to keep hope alive.
Helikon 2024 · Nominee
Izvan obhvat
Title translated by AI:“Out of Range”
Evgeni Cherepov · 43 when first published
Novel · 345 pages
AI-generated summary:The stories, joys and pains of ordinary, good people, the salt of the earth, gathered around what happens at the Svetlina mountain hut.
Helikon 2024 · Nominee
Ane
Novel · 200 pages · Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:An autofictional search for a lost home and a parenthood that never was, about a mother, abandonment and life with absence, violence against mind and body, and true sisterhood.
Helikon 2024 · Nominee
Slanchogledovi detsa
Title translated by AI:“Sunflower Children”
Novel · 312 pages · Coming of age, Love
AI-generated summary:A girl grows up in a small provincial town over the last few decades, through a love stretched between two continents, a long-kept secret, a violin with a mission and the prophecies four high-school friends once wrote down.
Helikon 2024 · Nominee
Mashina za pukanki
Title translated by AI:“Popcorn Machine”
Novel · 134 pages · Coming of age, Love
AI-generated summary:Stories that fit together like parts of one big machine for love, following a young man's heart in icy Varna winds as he keeps trying to work out what is going on.
Helikon 2024 · Nominee
Svetulki zad reshetkite
Title translated by AI:“Fireflies Behind Bars”
Novel · 392 pages
AI-generated summary:Two women whose minds and bodies are consumed by alcohol addiction meet in a psychiatric clinic, where the paths that led each of them there begin to unfold.
Helikon 2024 · Nominee
Ti, podobie moe
Title translated by AI:“You, My Likeness”
Radoslav Bimbalov · 51 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:The Creator tells the dramatic story of five imagined contemporaries in a society that has officially declared compassion a handicap.
Helikon 2024 · Nominee
Romanat na edna zhena bez kachestva
Title translated by AI:“The Novel of a Woman Without Qualities”
Novel · 208 pages
AI-generated summary:An ordinary woman, torn between washing the dishes and cooking for her family, sits down to write a novel; her musings on the absurdities of daily life alternate with the tangled story she is writing.
Helikon 2024 · Nominee
Godinata, koyato zapochna v nedelya
Title translated by AI:“The Year That Began on a Sunday”
Yanitsa Radeva · 47 when first published
Novel · 186 pages
AI-generated summary:Over one year, 1967, on Dream Street in a small provincial town, little Yoanna and her grandmother, known as the Lady, live among neighbours caught in the quiet, uneasy routine of building a socialist future.
Helikon 2024 · Nominee
Rana
Title translated by AI:“Wound”
Zachary Karabashliev · 55 when first published
Novel · 319 pages · War, Love, Historical
AI-generated summary:Sava, a refugee from Thrace after the Balkan Wars studying law in Sofia, and Eliza, a general's daughter and gifted pianist, share a brief love before the war sends him in September 1916 to the Dobrudzha front.
Helikon 2024 · Nominee
Lunichavi razkazi
Title translated by AI:“Freckled Stories”
Zdravka Evtimova · 64 when first published
Short stories · 205 pages
AI-generated summary:Twenty stories written over three years, some funny and some sad, with laughter and sadness as the main ingredients.
Helikon 2023 · Winner
Ne vi poznavam
Title translated by AI:“I Don't Know You”
Theodora Dimova · 63 when first published
Novel · 443 pages · Politics, Family
AI-generated summary:In present-day Bulgaria, Aleksandra, the child of an earlier novel, is now grown up and bears the weight of the past, as the mindset of 9 September 1944, long hidden, shows its teeth again.
Helikon 2023 · Nominee
Sheyset razkaza
Title translated by AI:“Sixty Stories”
Deyan Enev · 63 when first published
Short stories · 256 pages
AI-generated summary:Sixty short stories about people's fates, held together by a prayer for the unneeded.
Helikon 2023 · Nominee
Vulkan
Title translated by AI:“Volcano”
Elena Alexieva · 48 when first published
Novel · 539 pages
AI-generated summary:An ageing pop-art painter lost to Alzheimer's dreams of today's Bulgaria, where his Bulgarian carer Magda, her daughter, born with a rare condition, and a businessman who wants to turn cow dung into clean power cross paths.
Helikon 2023 · Nominee
Dom za nachinaeshti
Title translated by AI:“A Home for Beginners”
Novel · 416 pages · Coming of age, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A boy grows up on his own far from home, finding his way through the rooms of adolescence, where freedom is a home for beginners and the only certainty is the lack of it.
Helikon 2023 · Nominee
Igra bez final
Title translated by AI:“A Game Without an End”
Short stories · 132 pages
AI-generated summary:Short stories that turn small incidents and anecdotes into tightly held plots with a sharp final twist, alongside pieces that are pure description, about how the outside world is projected inside us.
Helikon 2023 · Nominee
Vkusni razkazi
Title translated by AI:“Tasty Stories”
Katerina Hapsali · 48 when first published
Short stories
AI-generated summary:Stories about the taste of life, bitter and sweet, sharp or refined, about the scent of home, the longing for love and company, and the food for the soul that binds people together.
Helikon 2023 · Nominee
Horata sa nezhni
Title translated by AI:“People Are Tender”
Short stories · 194 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories of survival, in which life breaks through a whirl of fears, rumours, theories, intrigues and protests like a dandelion on trampled ground.
Helikon 2023 · Nominee
Chekmo 2
Momchil Nikolov · 52 when first published
Novel · 352 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:Having left Bulgaria behind for the open roads of the world, Yonko, known as Chekmo, sets out on new absurd but nearly true adventures of the 1990s, carrying with him only the Bulgaria he can imagine.
Helikon 2023 · Nominee
Haosat v igrata na dzhagi
Title translated by AI:“Chaos in the Game of Juggling”
Palmi Ranchev · 72 when first published
Novel · 473 pages
AI-generated summary:Characters caught in schizophrenic absurdities and existential transformations reveal why Bulgarians feel they live amid a lie that never ends and an injustice that never goes away.
Helikon 2023 · Nominee
Vsichki sme stranitsi
Title translated by AI:“We Are All Pages”
Short stories · 145 pages
AI-generated summary:Short stories in which lives cross and drift apart in the big city or in memory, asking whether four glasses of water help at a parting and what you can learn about yourself while buying oranges.
Helikon 2023 · Nominee
Ekstazis
Radoslav Bimbalov · 50 when first published
Novel · 168 pages
AI-generated summary:Mikhail works for the creator of all things, collecting and keeping the last breaths of dying people in a place without memories, feelings or names, until something happens there that changes the rules for ever.
Helikon 2023 · Nominee
Plat i kraft
Title translated by AI:“Flesh and Craft”
Vasil Panayotov · 44 when first published
Novel · 228 pages
AI-generated summary:Katya, one of the outcasts doomed to live without friends or love, becomes so possessed by a single bodily pleasure that it shuts out all others, and she sinks into her vice and makes it her joy.
Helikon 2022 · Winner
Lovetsat na peperudi
Title translated by AI:“The Butterfly Hunter”
Novel · Historical
AI-generated summary:Built on the folk belief that a butterfly comes to a grave the day after a death to carry away the soul, the novel follows Lazar Karaivanov, an eccentric artist and killer from the vanished Danube island of Ada Kaleh, and his collection of butterflies.
Helikon 2022 · Nominee
Zhena na vyatara
Title translated by AI:“Woman of the Wind”
Alexander Sekulov · 57 when first published
Novel · 152 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:A man, a woman, a friend, a son and a father who sees through his son's eyes set out on a voyage without questions, with a captain who can take them far away but cannot bring them back.
Helikon 2022 · Nominee
Cherna svetlina
Title translated by AI:“Black Light”
Galin Nikiforov · 54 when first published
Novel · 295 pages · Crime, Family
AI-generated summary:One winter day the life of Anton, a freelance journalist and loving father, is shattered on an icy road; three years later, still lost in the past, he sees the man to blame for everything.
Helikon 2022 · Nominee
Atlanticheski ekspres
Title translated by AI:“Atlantic Express”
Georgi Tenev · 53 when first published
Novel · 211 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:The Atlantic Express leaves Europe over a fragile viaduct across the ocean, carrying refugees from a failed old continent, while in another dimension a young woman captains the ship Source across a distant galaxy.
Helikon 2022 · Nominee
Lovetsat na rusalki
Title translated by AI:“The Mermaid Hunter”
Krasimir Dimovski · 61 when first published
Short stories · 200 pages
AI-generated summary:Three novellas about love and rage, full of mysticism, magical eroticism and humour: a man's deadly drive to rule the world, a woman's to rule a man, and the drive towards creation.
Helikon 2022 · Nominee
Shte se varna za teb
Title translated by AI:“I'll Come Back for You”
Kristin Dimitrova · 59 when first published
Novel · 382 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Lazar, self-assured, handsome and incapable of deep ties, learns during a holiday in Italy paid for by his girlfriend that his mother has died, and back in Bulgaria for the funeral stumbles on a carefully kept secret.
Helikon 2022 · Nominee
Po relsite
Title translated by AI:“Along the Rails”
Nevena Mitropolitska · 52 when first published
Novel · 348 pages · Historical, Migration
AI-generated summary:An old Jewish woman in Bulgaria looks back on a life that includes a Treblinka-bound train waiting at Kyustendil station in 1943, while her fifteen-year-old granddaughter struggles with betrayal and loneliness as an emigrant in Canada.
Helikon 2022 · Nominee
Zvezdi pod klepachite
Title translated by AI:“Stars Under the Eyelids”
Nikolay Terziyski · 39 when first published
Novel · 332 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:People living under the Bulgarian sky face the choice of whether to forgive someone or condemn them, and of whether to leave the person who matters most, in a novel about time and love.
Helikon 2022 · Nominee
Mlak
Title translated by AI:“Shush”
Radoslav Bimbalov · 49 when first published
Short stories · 183 pages
AI-generated summary:Twenty-one stories about the weight of the human soul, about words that are on the tip of the tongue and then vanish, and about the subjects people sweep under the carpet and pretend belong to someone else.
Helikon 2022 · Nominee
Hagabula
Todor P. Todorov · 45 when first published
Novel · 340 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In a magic-realist retelling, Hernán Cortés and his expedition travel towards the mountain of the Aztecs through a dreamlike reality that leads to unforeseen revelations.
Helikon 2022 · Nominee
Napraveni ot vina
Title translated by AI:“Made of Guilt”
Novel · 326 pages · Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:Yana, called Jane in America, has crossed the ocean to escape her family, and from there tells of her 1990s Sofia childhood and of her grandmother Eva and mother Lilia, women who lived with violence and silence.
Helikon 2022 · Nominee
Резерват за хора и вълци · Rezervat za hora i valtsi
Zdravka Evtimova · 63 when first published
Novel · 272 pages
AI-generated summary:In Staro Selo, a poor Bulgarian neighbourhood ruled by crime, Dimitar grows rich by keeping everyone in fear, but old Elena, a healer with something of the witch about her, will not keep quiet about what her neighbours suffer.
Helikon 2021 · Winner
Rezidentsiyata
Title translated by AI:“The Residence”
Georgi Tenev · 51 when first published
Novel · 238 pages · Speculative, Politics
AI-generated summary:After the middle of the twenty-first century, in a state that has kept many features of ours, the country is divided between the Mountain Republic and a Free Zone, in a world of bans and repression.
Helikon 2021 · Nominee
Misia Turan
Title translated by AI:“Mission Turan”
Alek Popov · 55 when first published
Novel · 409 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:In Turan, a small, backward republic in Central Asia, an expedition from a rich Bulgaria in the EU looks for descendants of the ancient Bulgars, just as elections approach and politicians at home want new Bulgarians to vote for them.
Helikon 2021 · Nominee
Mene me sanuva mravka
Title translated by AI:“An Ant Dreams Me”
Short stories · 80 pages
AI-generated summary:Short stories, mocking and tender at once, that move freely between reality and metaphysics, mixing fine sarcasm with surrealism to tell of the ailing human soul.
Helikon 2021 · Nominee
Shestiyat prast
Title translated by AI:“The Sixth Finger”
Novel · 192 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Sixteen-year-old Pavel, a gifted violinist raised in Germany, travels to a small Bulgarian provincial town with his stepfather Heinrich Weber to meet the father he does not remember, who must give up his parental rights.
Helikon 2021 · Nominee
Kervan za garvani
Title translated by AI:“A Caravan for Ravens”
Novel · 176 pages
AI-generated summary:Nikolay Todorov, a drab geography teacher in a small town in north-east Bulgaria, wins a European project, falls apart at the banquet held in his honour and sets off across the forgotten villages of the region.
Helikon 2021 · Nominee
Nakraya avtorat umira
Title translated by AI:“In the End the Author Dies”
Short stories · 260 pages
AI-generated summary:A debut collection of stories and novellas that its first readers took for psychological thrillers; the longest novella places an invented man, Johannes Winckelmann, and his family in an otherwise historically accurate world.
Helikon 2021 · Nominee
T kato Tashkent
Title translated by AI:“T for Tashkent”
Hristo Karastoyanov · 71 when first published
Novel · 248 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:In the early 1950s a Bulgarian journalist, under the protection of State Security, is let into top-secret archives on events in 1920s Bulgaria, and the documents lead him to unexpected encounters with figures of the past.
Helikon 2021 · Nominee
Vegaski istorii za mistitsi i prorotsi
Title translated by AI:“Vegas Stories of Mystics and Prophets”
Short stories · 156 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:Stories of Bulgarian emigrants in Las Vegas, where a cheerful and slightly cynical guide leads the reader through the streets of Sin City among mystics, boors and memories blurred by spirits.
Helikon 2021 · Nominee
Momicheto, koeto predskazvashe minaloto
Title translated by AI:“The Girl Who Foretold the Past”
Krasimir Dimovski · 60 when first published
Short stories · 152 pages
AI-generated summary:Thirteen stories in which children tell of the world of adults they share, asking whether the past can be foretold and the future remembered.
Helikon 2021 · Nominee
Prevartane
Title translated by AI:“Rollover”
Petar Denchev · 35 when first published
Novel · 392 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Maria Ivanova watches seabirds tear apart her old body, and from that moment she begins a new life in a body of about twenty.
Helikon 2021 · Nominee
Opashkata
Title translated by AI:“The Tail”
Zachary Karabashliev · 53 when first published
Novel · 390 pages · Speculative, Love, Politics
AI-generated summary:A few years after the Second Pandemic, amid economic upheaval and mass unrest, Pavel proposes to Nevena and that same night discovers that she has inexplicably grown a real tail.
Helikon 2020 · Winner
Imena pod snega
Title translated by AI:“Names Under the Snow”
Short stories · 180 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:Stories of lonely people, most of them Bulgarians scattered across the old continent, some of whom come from the author's earlier books about a dying Danube village and a dying Danube town.
Helikon 2020 · Nominee
Perfektna koloda
Title translated by AI:“A Perfect Deck”
Short stories · 152 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories about friends, passionate gamblers, professionals and amateurs, people who know that the universe holds its breath when the deck is shuffled.
Helikon 2020 · Nominee
Lala bosa
Title translated by AI:“Lala Barefoot”
Deyan Enev · 59 when first published
Short stories · 108 pages
AI-generated summary:Very short stories, like charcoal drawings and pieces cast in bronze, about good human lives met on early winter mornings.
Helikon 2020 · Nominee
Mir na kumirite ni
Title translated by AI:“Peace to Our Idols”
Georgi Mishev · 85 when first published
Nonfiction · 336 pages
AI-generated summary:Memoir sketches of a Bulgarian society that, thirty years after 'real socialism', has built bleak towns instead of a modern state, abandoned its fields and seen its young people blown abroad.
Helikon 2020 · Nominee
Sara i drugite
Title translated by AI:“Sara and the Others”
Novel · 220 pages · Migration, Love
AI-generated summary:Through erotic and intimate diaries, four Bulgarians who left their country to look for happiness in America, Switzerland, France and England tell their stories, with the beautiful and mysterious Sara shining over them.
Helikon 2020 · Nominee
Belezhki za zabravyane
Title translated by AI:“Notes for Forgetting”
Ivan Kulekov · 68 when first published
Short stories
Helikon 2020 · Nominee
Chekmo
Momchil Nikolov · 49 when first published
Novel · 520 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:In the last years of communist Bulgaria, Yonko, nicknamed Chekmo, chooses the hard road of total freedom, a path that leads from army drudgery, currency deals and gambling to refugee camps and a not yet reunited Berlin.
Helikon 2020 · Nominee
Kozidor
Novel · 256 pages
AI-generated summary:Kozidor, who turned 94 in 2004, has a hotel named after him whose owner is once again in trouble, in a comic novel.
Helikon 2020 · Nominee
Ne kazvay na mama
Title translated by AI:“Don't Tell Mum”
Novel · 400 pages
AI-generated summary:A narrator who cannot remember who they were in life, man or woman, wonders whether they were Nae-il, born in the grey North, handsome Kasim of the desert, Tamika with the voice everyone loved, or someone else.
Helikon 2020 · Nominee
Syanka
Title translated by AI:“Shadow”
Vasil Panayotov · 42 when first published
Novel · 204 pages
AI-generated summary:A man who sees no light ahead counts down the thirty days before his planned suicide, dissecting the world in cold blood, and through his shadow gets a chance at redemption, or a last deal with God.
Helikon 2020 · Nominee
Moyat Shabat
Title translated by AI:“My Shabbat”
Novel · 180 pages · Autofiction, Family
AI-generated summary:Writing for grandchildren who live abroad, a Jewish woman from Burgas gathers her family's story and memories of the old seaside town around her own modest, provincial Sabbath.
Helikon 2020 · Nominee
Savarshenstvo
Title translated by AI:“Perfection”
Vlado Daverov · 72 when first published
Short stories · 240 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories that trace the path of spirit and flesh from infinity to birth: children who believe in Father Christmas, grow up, see their games end and race through history.
Helikon 2019 · Winner
Preselenieto
Title translated by AI:“The Migration”
Boyan Biolchev · 76 when first published
Novella · 182 pages · War, Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:During the First Balkan War, as Turkish troops ravage the Bulgarian villages of Aegean Thrace, a Bulgarian family flees with two sons, a daughter and a newborn granddaughter, while the baby's father deserts the Ottoman army to avoid firing on Bulgarians.
Helikon 2019 · Nominee
Nakade teche rekata
Title translated by AI:“Where the River Flows”
Chavdar Tsenov · 62 when first published
Novel · 245 pages
AI-generated summary:A former geography teacher who dreamed of travel but never left Bulgaria, a friend who longed for a flat and ended up on the street, and a professor with thousands of books who never wrote one: their shared failures lead the teacher to compose a speech on dreams.
Helikon 2019 · Nominee
Komparsita
Dimitar Shumnaliev · 72 when first published
Novel · 376 pages · Historical, Politics, Love
AI-generated summary:During the Second World War, orphans grow up in the care of the beautiful Miss Monika on her estate; in the 1950s she and the girl her favourite, Vit, loves are sent to a women's labour camp, where Vit works as a doctor.
Helikon 2019 · Nominee
Sveti valk
Title translated by AI:“Holy Wolf”
Elena Alexieva · 43 when first published
Novel · 406 pages
AI-generated summary:A nameless man just out of a madhouse, the only passenger on a night train to the sea, gets off in an open field and ends up in an illegal coal mine worked by scholars and a whole underground town.
Helikon 2019 · Nominee
Balkanski ritual
Title translated by AI:“Balkan Ritual”
Georgi Tenev · 50 when first published
Novel · 520 pages · Crime, Politics
AI-generated summary:From the Vatican to Persepolis, from the parliament in Sofia to the banks of the Euphrates, a historical thriller in which a stolen book appears out of nowhere and Commissioner Kolev holds the key to the secrets of power.
Helikon 2019 · Nominee
Dazhdovete na straha
Title translated by AI:“The Rains of Fear”
Novel · 248 pages
AI-generated summary:A novel that moves between real and less real worlds, from the sound of fir needles swept up in a quiet Plovdiv home to the road from Chernobyl and the half-dead sewer rats of 1968, where digging into the past matters as much as the present.
Helikon 2019 · Nominee
Sinat na aviatora
Title translated by AI:“The Aviator's Son”
Krum Filipov · 49 when first published
Novel · 164 pages
Helikon 2019 · Nominee
Malkiyat bog na zemetrasa
Title translated by AI:“The Little God of the Earthquake”
Petar Denchev · 33 when first published
Novel · 300 pages
AI-generated summary:When someone vanishes mysteriously one night, a man whose love affair is collapsing follows the trail back through his own past and other people's, from Sofia's streets and his father's ruined house to the Danube and the bazaar of Skopje.
Helikon 2019 · Nominee
Pile, zmia, zvyar i dyulya
Petko Simeonov · 77 when first published
Short stories · 272 pages
AI-generated summary:Four novellas set in a provincial Bulgaria left unnamed but easy to recognise, where familiar historical figures and everyday situations from the Second World War to today keep swerving into magic, myth and the absurd.
Helikon 2019 · Nominee
Porazenite
Title translated by AI:“The Stricken”
Theodora Dimova · 59 when first published
Novel · 250 pages · Historical, Politics, Family
AI-generated summary:On an icy February dawn, a group of women whose husbands have been killed walk to the pit where the bodies were buried, in a novel about three women and a child struck down by the regime set up after the coup of 9 September 1944.
Helikon 2019 · Nominee
Chudovishteto
Title translated by AI:“The Monster”
Vladimir Zarev · 72 when first published
Novel · 303 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Simeon Stanimirov, an ageing writer, agrees to a series of interviews with Niya, a young journalist who wants to turn them into a book, and as he tells her about his life he falls helplessly in love with her.
Helikon 2019 · Nominee
Dobrata strana na neshtata
Title translated by AI:“The Bright Side of Things”
Zdravka Evtimova · 60 when first published
Short stories · 184 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories that look for the good side of bad things, and sometimes the reverse, about ordinary people's everyday traumas and disasters, loves and breakups, betrayals, partings, forgiveness, revenge and worry for their children.
Helikon 2018 · Nominee
Sestri Palaveevi po patya kam novia svyat
Title translated by AI:“The Palaveevi Sisters on the Road to the New World”
Alek Popov · 51 when first published
Novel · 432 pages · War, Satire, Historical
AI-generated summary:The twins Kara and Yara return, swept up in the Second World War from Serbia and Macedonia to England and America, among Bulgarian communists, Yugoslav partisans and a gang of dwarfs.
Helikon 2018 · Nominee
Bezumetsat ot Taro
Title translated by AI:“The Madman of Taro”
Novel · 152 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Judge Nadya Chernyak, beautiful, respected and suffocating in a model life, and Dominique, a Basque fleeing a shady past in Bulgaria, lock eyes in a courtroom and begin a fiery affair caught by a security camera.
Helikon 2018 · Nominee
Mir vam
Title translated by AI:“Peace Be with You”
Emiliya Dvoryanova · 60 when first published
Novel · 384 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:In a world that seems empty and void again, Ut and Mo set out to learn whether the world still exists, walking on without answers, in a language woven from the imagery of the Psalms.
Helikon 2018 · Nominee
Tyalo pod roklyata
Title translated by AI:“A Body Under the Dress”
Galin Nikiforov · 50 when first published
Novel · 244 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Boris, the loneliest man in the world, has lost part of himself and is ready to put his body through terrible pain to purify his soul, in a story of a brother and a sister, twins who are incomplete without each other.
Helikon 2018 · Nominee
Vsichkite nashi tela
Title translated by AI:“All Our Bodies”
Georgi Gospodinov · 50 when first published
Short stories · 139 pages
AI-generated summary:Very short stories, funny and absurd, melancholy and ironic, among them selected autobiographies, a census of the night watch, a rooster in the Pirogov hospital and the angel of unread books.
Helikon 2018 · Nominee
Kato pristignesh, obadi se
Title translated by AI:“Call When You Arrive”
Kristin Dimitrova · 54 when first published
Short stories · 268 pages
AI-generated summary:Twenty-one stories balanced between humour and drama, in which ordinary people stuck in the shallows of life suddenly face great truths about themselves, in a chaotic present-day Bulgaria.
Helikon 2018 · Nominee
Piafe
Nedyalko Slavov · 66 when first published
Novel · 184 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Kris and Zara, a man and a woman drawn together and pulled apart, try to hold on to their love in a world that grows more absurd by the day.
Helikon 2018 · Nominee
Tazi vecher nishto ne e sluchayno
Title translated by AI:“Tonight Nothing Is by Chance”
Palmi Ranchev · 68 when first published
Short stories · 320 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories of the outsiders of a big city in a society where sadism, cynicism, greed and hunger for power, inherited from the communist dictatorship, rule and the dying old elite is hard to tell from the rising new one.
Helikon 2018 · Nominee
Grohot
Title translated by AI:“Rumble”
Novel · 240 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1941, with the German Reich ruling from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Bulgaria faces a fateful choice, and the war is seen through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier and of the people in its path.
Helikon 2018 · Nominee
Neznaynite obrazi horski
Title translated by AI:“Unknown Human Images”
Short stories · 192 pages
AI-generated summary:Everyday stories that turn fantastic: a little boy throws a ball at the sun, a man looks for his long-forgotten face, and a businesswoman glances across the street and sees herself.
Helikon 2018 · Nominee
Keder
Title translated by AI:“Sorrow”
Yordanka Beleva · 41 when first published
Short stories · 89 pages
AI-generated summary:Short stories of loss and of those left behind, among them a village family who keep mending a dead neighbour's bicycle tyres each morning, caught in the forty sorrows the dead are said to leave their loved ones.
Helikon 2018 · Nominee
Zelenite ochi na vyatara
Title translated by AI:“The Green Eyes of the Wind”
Zdravka Evtimova · 59 when first published
Novel · 284 pages
AI-generated summary:Among people who bow and crawl their way to comfort and power, a few refuse to give in, among them little Ana, who senses early that closeness is not a matter of blood.
Helikon 2017 · Winner
Drugiyat san
Title translated by AI:“The Other Dream”
Vladimir Poleganov · 37 when first published
Novel · 168 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:After dialling a wrong number, a young man finds himself in an unknown world that slowly fills with strange objects and people, each step leading to horror at the unfamiliar or wonder at it.
Helikon 2017 · Nominee
Praznata peshtera
Title translated by AI:“The Empty Cave”
Novel · 476 pages · Speculative, Politics
AI-generated summary:An unnamed Balkan state where everyone speaks Bulgarian is ruled by former smugglers of antiquities who make a cult of history, sealing the borders, controlling the internet and sending dissenters to the mines.
Helikon 2017 · Nominee
Ulitsi i korabi
Title translated by AI:“Streets and Ships”
Short stories · 184 pages
AI-generated summary:A sequel to a book about a dying village on the Danube, now set in a Danube city that is dying too, with many of the same characters living, loving and dying beside the great river in the second half of the twentieth century.
Helikon 2017 · Nominee
Zatvorisartse
Title translated by AI:“Close-Your-Heart”
Novel · 312 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Two men marked by love meet by chance and tell each other their lives, opening many doors into Bulgaria's history since the 1990s.
Helikon 2017 · Nominee
A Bog se smee
Title translated by AI:“And God Laughs”
Maria Stankova · 60 when first published
Novel · 195 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:Bulgarian emigrants at Christmas, far from home, are slowly gnawed to the bone by life abroad, in body and in spirit.
Helikon 2017 · Nominee
Chamkoria
Milen Ruskov · 51 when first published
Novel · 402 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:In the 1920s, as Bulgaria is torn between two military and political blocs, a man belonging to neither is drawn by his job into some of the darkest secrets of his time.
Helikon 2017 · Nominee
Samo za napusheni
Title translated by AI:“Only for the Stoned”
Radoslav Parushev · 42 when first published
Short stories · 136 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Twenty-one short stories written mainly to entertain, ranging from the evolution of fruit bats and warthogs to court etiquette under Alexander the Great and men's fixation on women's breasts.
Helikon 2017 · Nominee
Parviyat rozhden den
Title translated by AI:“The First Birthday”
Theodora Dimova · 56 when first published
Novella · 122 pages
AI-generated summary:The young Mariam and the old Joseph, each with a family history behind them, tell in two voices how the visit of the angel Gabriel upends their quiet lives in the year before and after the birth of Jesus.
Helikon 2017 · Nominee
Po kolko pati na den ne umirame
Title translated by AI:“How Many Times a Day We Don't Die”
Short stories · 152 pages
AI-generated summary:Thirty-six stories, mixing realism and fantasy, about the many small ways people go on not dying, with death present in half of them and the perspective often turned around at the very end.
Helikon 2017 · Nominee
S aromat na tyutyun
Ventsislav Bozhinov · 46 when first published
Short stories · 268 pages
Helikon 2017 · Nominee
Havra
Zachary Karabashliev · 49 when first published
Novel · 704 pages · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:After thirteen years in America, Nikola Markov returns to his home town for his father's funeral; at the end of the nineteenth century the young Russian aristocrat Vera Elegina meets an American war correspondent.
Helikon 2017 · Nominee
Yulski razkazi
Title translated by AI:“July Stories”
Zdravka Evtimova · 58 when first published
Short stories · 296 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories that are painfully funny in places and full of bright sadness a few pages later, about human love in its many forms, each of them a door to a universe of its own.
Helikon 2016 · Winner
Kambanata
Title translated by AI:“The Bell”
Nedyalko Slavov · 64 when first published
Novel · 208 pages
AI-generated summary:In a dying Bulgarian village of a few old people abandoned by the state, Veno, an ex-convict nicknamed Samurai, takes it upon himself to protect his helpless neighbours and to ring the alarm bell.
Helikon 2016 · Nominee
Skitnikat i sinovete
Title translated by AI:“The Wanderer and His Sons”
Alexander Sekulov · 51 when first published
Novel · 222 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Captain Yosif, a striking man, sad lover and serene soul, sails his two-masted yacht and can do everything on land and sea except deal with children on board, especially when one of them is his own son.
Helikon 2016 · Nominee
Priklyuchenieto zhivot. Lyuboven roman 55+
Title translated by AI:“The Adventure of Life: A Love Novel 55+”
Novel · 268 pages · Love, Family
AI-generated summary:Sofia, 2010: a woman and her mother, now over eighty, refuse to be weighed down by their age, keep looking for love and happiness, and find them when they least expect it.
Helikon 2016 · Nominee
Zhivot na polovini
Title translated by AI:“Life in Halves”
Short stories · 100 pages
AI-generated summary:Very short stories that seek a passage to other worlds in the maze of city life, where seemingly trivial events lead the characters to unexpected revelations.
Helikon 2016 · Nominee
Grizli. Novi razkazi
Title translated by AI:“Grizzly: New Stories”
Deyan Enev · 55 when first published
Short stories · 120 pages
AI-generated summary:Thirty-six short stories and two prose poems, a book in which live embers still glow under the grey ash of age.
Helikon 2016 · Nominee
Az oshte broya dnite
Title translated by AI:“I Am Still Counting the Days”
Georgi Bardarov · 43 when first published
Novel · 182 pages · War, Love
AI-generated summary:On a warm May night in 1993, in besieged Sarajevo, Davor, a Christian, and Ayda, a Muslim, wait for the short lull when the snipers rest to make their escape; twenty years later a Bulgarian writer travels to Sarajevo to meet his Serbian translator.
Helikon 2016 · Nominee
Zalivat na Ifigenia
Title translated by AI:“Iphigenia's Bay”
Short stories · 240 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories and novellas whose characters confess their loves, passions and magic, drawing the reader into a spiral of events that will not let go.
Helikon 2016 · Nominee
Poslednata teritoria
Title translated by AI:“The Last Territory”
Momchil Nikolov · 46 when first published
Novel · 631 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:A man wakes up in Barcelona with no idea how he got there, not even recognising his own face, while Manolo, a psychiatrist born with deformed limbs because of thalidomide, has learned to roam the last territory: the world of dreams.
Helikon 2016 · Nominee
Pochti zhivot
Title translated by AI:“Almost a Life”
Rada Moskova · 82 when first published
Short stories · 174 pages
AI-generated summary:Autobiographical prose by a writer who has lived through three Bulgarias, recalling the cruelties and humiliations suffered by ordinary people whom communism's promised 'new life' cast aside.
Helikon 2016 · Nominee
Milost za priyatelite
Title translated by AI:“Mercy for Friends”
Novel · 299 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A gang of ordinary boys from a small seaside town looks, sometimes naively, for its place in a heartless and confused world during the years of Bulgaria's transition.
Helikon 2016 · Nominee
Perlite na Adi Landau
Title translated by AI:“The Pearls of Adi Landau”
Novel · 248 pages · Historical, War, Family
AI-generated summary:A pair of pearl earrings passes through generations, from the Jewish ghetto of Vienna and the palaces of the Ringstrasse through war-torn Europe and the Kaylaka camp to the provincial town of Ferdinand, linking a Viennese boy and a Sofia girl.
Helikon 2016 · Nominee
Eks orbita
Novel · 272 pages · Speculative, Satire
AI-generated summary:In 2097, Pempo and Marion cycle to see what is left of their great-grandparents' house in Samograd, an isolated town at the edge of the country, where Marion disappears and Pempo is kidnapped by the Transmentalists.
Helikon 2015 · Winner
432 hertsa
Title translated by AI:“432 Hertz”
Nedyalko Slavov · 63 when first published
Novel · 176 pages
AI-generated summary:Starting from the myth around Goebbels's 1939 order to tune the note A to 440 rather than 432 hertz, the novel follows a young, gifted musician who composes an immortal work in a single night, setting off a battle between good and evil.
Helikon 2015 · Nominee
Krotkite
Title translated by AI:“The Meek”
Angel Igov · 34 when first published
Novel · 195 pages
AI-generated summary:In the autumn of 1944, after the communist coup, Emil Strezov, a young unpublished poet from an outlying Sofia neighbourhood, becomes a prosecutor at the People's Court, watched by the ordinary neighbours who tell his story.
Helikon 2015 · Nominee
Otklonenia naesen
Title translated by AI:“Detours in Autumn”
Chavdar Tsenov · 59 when first published
Short stories · 232 pages
AI-generated summary:Short novellas that find invisible gaps in everyday life, out of which strange, deep and melancholy worlds emerge: a slightly torn flag, a bicycle that may have been stolen, a word that seems to mean nothing.
Helikon 2015 · Nominee
Skarida
Title translated by AI:“Shrimp”
Dimitar Kotsev-Shosho · 44 when first published
Novel · 296 pages
AI-generated summary:Diva Mila, the Assistant and Bor, three people with exotic jobs and strange names, willingly climb onto a merry-go-round of intrigue, love and betrayal that brings them up against an ancient ruler, a fearsome criminal and an ultra-secret society.
Helikon 2015 · Nominee
Lisitsata
Title translated by AI:“The Fox”
Galin Nikiforov · 46 when first published
Novel · 557 pages · Crime, Love
AI-generated summary:A remarkable woman who has carried her love for her child across the centuries and a police psychologist torn by his own guilt, investigating the most puzzling murder of his career, find their way to each other.
Helikon 2015 · Nominee
Gratsko kafe
Title translated by AI:“Greek Coffee”
Katerina Hapsali · 40 when first published
Novel · 270 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:After her Greek businessman husband dies in a car crash, a young Bulgarian journalist faces a harsh truth that surfaces and dives into her family's history to find herself and the strength to bear the pain.
Helikon 2015 · Nominee
Razglobeno lyato
Title translated by AI:“A Dismantled Summer”
Ludmil Todorov · 59 when first published
Novel · 320 pages · Love, Historical
AI-generated summary:Some twenty characters search for their identity from the 1960s to the start of the twenty-first century, across the long stagnation before 1989 and the chaotic years after it, with love as the thread between both eras.
Helikon 2015 · Nominee
Kotkata
Title translated by AI:“The Cat”
Novel · 134 pages
AI-generated summary:A nameless woman has shrunk her mind to that of an animal, and her first-person story splits between her own voice and the cat's as she pieces together the outside world she has fled.
Helikon 2015 · Nominee
Pechataryat
Title translated by AI:“The Printer”
Novel · 460 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:The life of Yakov Kraykov, born in the Balkans, who worked in sixteenth-century Venice as one of the first printers of Cyrillic books, a half-historical, half-mystical figure hidden in the shadows of the past.
Helikon 2015 · Nominee
Avramovi hroniki
Title translated by AI:“Avramov Chronicles”
Novel · 299 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:Drawn from real names, times and events, the story of Halil and Gyulten, Nurten and Mustafa, set against the fate of Bulgaria's Jews and the forced renaming of the Turkish minority in 1984–1985.
Helikon 2015 · Nominee
Orlov most
Title translated by AI:“Eagles' Bridge”
Vladimir Zarev · 68 when first published
Novel · 317 pages · Love, Politics
AI-generated summary:During the winter protests at Sofia's Eagles' Bridge against a political class that has plundered the country, Pavel, a lawyer who made a lot of money, and Yulia, both leaders of the protesters, fall into an impossible love.
Helikon 2015 · Nominee
Edna i sashta reka
Title translated by AI:“One and the Same River”
Zdravka Evtimova · 56 when first published
Novel · 272 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Three sisters live in the small Bulgarian town of Radomir: Pirina sings wordless songs that heal sadness, Sara keeps changing partners, and Lyuba reads so much that she is absent from everyday life.
Helikon 2014 · Winner
Една и съща нощ · Edna i sashta nosht
Hristo Karastoyanov · 64 when first published
Novel · 292 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:A writer keeps the diary of a novel about Bulgaria in the 1920s, the poet Geo Milev and the anarchist Georgi Sheitanov, who drew Milev towards anarchism, and the night of those years merges with the present.
Helikon 2014 · Nominee
Pri vhoda na moreto
Title translated by AI:“At the Entrance to the Sea”
Emiliya Dvoryanova · 56 when first published
Novel · 338 pages
AI-generated summary:By the sea, among cliffs and cormorants, a woman arrives at a sanatorium whose strange patients have no known illness, and her suffering and melancholy set her on a path towards healing and towards the Other.
Helikon 2014 · Nominee
Razporeditelite na smuta
Title translated by AI:“The Stewards of Unrest”
Novel · 284 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Boys grow into men and friends around the time of Bulgaria's transition, with the women in their lives and a world music fame that never comes, in a mosaic of stories that is also a fantasy saga.
Helikon 2014 · Nominee
Moyat taen lyuboven zhivot
Title translated by AI:“My Secret Love Life”
Ivo Siromahov · 43 when first published
Novel · 166 pages · Satire, Love
AI-generated summary:A beautiful American woman falls for a not especially handsome Bulgarian man, comes to Bulgaria and runs into the national mindset and its customs, from pig slaughtering and drinking feasts to a customs officer's wedding.
Helikon 2014 · Nominee
Skeptitsi
Title translated by AI:“Sceptics”
Ludmil Todorov · 58 when first published
Novella · 138 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:The intimate bond between a brother and a sister over almost twenty years of their lives: their childhood and school loves, later passions, crises, failures and successes.
Helikon 2014 · Nominee
Natyurmort s mazhe
Title translated by AI:“Still Life with Men”
Short stories · 166 pages
AI-generated summary:Strange, many-coloured stories told with black humour that push their hands into the hidden corners of the imagination, free of the ghost of communism and of mobsters' bloodstains.
Helikon 2014 · Nominee
2 romana: Mravki s fenercheta. Sluginyata
Title translated by AI:“Two Novels: Ants with Torches; The Maid”
Novel · 228 pages
AI-generated summary:Two short novels: in the first, people are no more than ants with torches who find each other in the dark; in the second, a twelve-year-old girl who sows fear around her wonders how women turn a story into clothes, children and houses.
Helikon 2014 · Nominee
Vsichki razkazi sa za teb
Title translated by AI:“All Stories Are About You”
Mirela Ivanova · 52 when first published
Short stories · 132 pages
AI-generated summary:A dozen stories about university teachers, doctors, patients, photographers, musicians, homeless people and artists, each trying to piece together a life torn by politics, the past and the pursuit of success.
Helikon 2014 · Nominee
Portret na poeta kato mlad
Title translated by AI:“Portrait of the Poet as a Young Man”
Nedyalko Slavov · 61 when first published
Novel · 160 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:At exactly midnight a young poet finishes his poem and declares his beloved Thea dead to him, in a novel that returns to an era when the refined was considered harmful and the spiritual was forced into a foreign mould.
Helikon 2014 · Nominee
Boksyori i sluchayni minuvachi
Title translated by AI:“Boxers and Chance Passers-By”
Palmi Ranchev · 63 when first published
Short stories · 232 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories about men in and around the boxing ring, rough yet sentimental, clumsy yet devoted, for whom boxing turns out to be a matter of talent, technique and hard work, much like writing.
Helikon 2014 · Nominee
Vartop
Title translated by AI:“Whirlpool”
Novel · 180 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:In the winter of 1944 a thirteen-year-old girl and her mother are thrown out of their home and exiled to the provinces; in the autumn of 1988 two classmates on a compulsory work brigade in the village of Kosten hear the local legend of the whirlpool.
Helikon 2014 · Nominee
Vlakat za Emaus
Title translated by AI:“The Train to Emmaus”
Theodora Dimova · 54 when first published
Novel · 151 pages
AI-generated summary:A many-layered account of a life that has passed through trials and grief, of a slowly approaching death and the overcoming of the fear of it, of finding faith and of the meetings we keep walking towards.
Helikon 2013 · Winner
Sestri Palaveevi v buryata na istoriyata
Title translated by AI:“The Palaveevi Sisters in the Storm of History”
Alek Popov · 47 when first published
Novel · 307 pages · War, Satire, Historical
AI-generated summary:In the middle of the Second World War, Kara and Yara, twin daughters of a wealthy Sofia family, run away from home to join the partisans and end up in the unit of Medved, a stern commander trained by Soviet military intelligence.
Helikon 2013 · Nominee
Kucheta pod indigo
Title translated by AI:“Dogs Under Carbon Paper”
Chavdar Tsenov · 56 when first published
Novel · 280 pages
AI-generated summary:Tommy, a sceptical and ironic flâneur drifting through life in the south-eastern corner of Europe at the start of the twenty-first century, asks the old questions: where do we come from, what are we, where are we going?
Helikon 2013 · Nominee
Vnukat na Heminguey
Title translated by AI:“Hemingway's Grandson”
Deyan Enev · 53 when first published
Short stories · 85 pages
AI-generated summary:Short stories, sad and playful by turns, that walk the reader through everyday life past a woman on a bench who may be mad, a child sick with loneliness and lovers in the corner café.
Helikon 2013 · Nominee
Zapiski na svinyata
Title translated by AI:“Notes of the Pig”
Ina Valchanova · 60 when first published
Novel · 189 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:One summer in Sozopol, apocalyptic events follow one after another, only hinted at and never explained, while the heroine, disoriented and self-destructive, is by turns cynically detached and touchingly helpless.
Helikon 2013 · Nominee
Bez milost
Title translated by AI:“Without Mercy”
Ivan Golev · 63 when first published
Novel · 192 pages
Helikon 2013 · Nominee
Studentat po harmonia. Balada za Viktor Paskov
Title translated by AI:“The Harmony Student: A Ballad for Viktor Paskov”
Krassimir Damianov · 64 when first published
Novel · 246 pages
AI-generated summary:A novel dedicated both to the writer Viktor Paskov and to the twisted times of late socialism, bearing witness to the agony of a whole generation.
Helikon 2013 · Nominee
Razkazi
Title translated by AI:“Stories”
Ludmil Todorov · 57 when first published
Short stories · 262 pages
AI-generated summary:Thirty-five stories that do not look away from the human misery we refuse to see, recording the moral awkwardness of the present without accusing or forgiving anyone.
Helikon 2013 · Nominee
Shlep v pustinyata
Title translated by AI:“A Barge in the Desert”
Ludmil Todorov · 57 when first published
Novel · 154 pages
AI-generated summary:An English teacher in Ruse, who for years has timed the barges passing behind a new block of flats on the Danube, watches one disappear and never come out the other side.
Helikon 2013 · Nominee
Radikalna evreyska entsiklopedia
Title translated by AI:“A Radical Jewish Encyclopedia”
Petar Volgin · 44 when first published
Short stories · 287 pages
AI-generated summary:Portraits of Jews who broke with tradition, from Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud to Golda Meir, mixed with the deepening investigation of an editor at a small publisher who sees a neo-Nazi conspiracy around him.
Helikon 2013 · Nominee
Anapesta
Novel · 162 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A young woman living in her own world wants nothing from life, expects nothing because of her past and is repelled by the thought of love, until a chance meeting makes her think about herself.
Helikon 2013 · Nominee
Aparat
Title translated by AI:“Apparatus”
Novel · 324 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:A failed marketer builds a machine to help people use their minds again after advertising has damaged them, while a young man tries to pull off the coup of his life.
Helikon 2013 · Nominee
Bezhantsi
Title translated by AI:“Refugees”
Vesela Lyahova · 52 when first published
Novel · 702 pages · Historical, Migration
AI-generated summary:A saga of Bulgarian refugees at a time when survival was a way of life, built on a careful reconstruction of the historical record.
Helikon 2012 · Winner
Imeto
Title translated by AI:“The Name”
Hristo Karastoyanov · 62 when first published
Novel · 216 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Inspired by the tale that Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the last Russian emperor, survived the shooting in Yekaterinburg and lived in Bulgaria, the novel imagines one possible life.
Helikon 2012 · Nominee
Gospod sliza v Atina
Title translated by AI:“God Comes Down to Athens”
Alexander Sekulov · 48 when first published
Novel · 156 pages
AI-generated summary:In the summer of 2011 two men reach Athens on their way to nowhere: Aleksandar Verenski, a former banker and elegant anarchist, and Fred Zimmerman, a news-agency correspondent travelling after a woman he spent one night with.
Helikon 2012 · Nominee
Balgarcheto ot Alyaska
Title translated by AI:“The Little Bulgarian from Alaska”
Deyan Enev · 51 when first published
Short stories · 139 pages
AI-generated summary:Short, stark stories of present-day Sofia about ordinary people who keep losing something as they struggle to get by, for whom the greatest success is to survive or to leave for somewhere as far away as Alaska.
Helikon 2012 · Nominee
Nobelistat
Title translated by AI:“The Nobel Laureate”
Elena Alexieva · 36 when first published
Novel · 396 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:A Nobel laureate for literature on a visit to Sofia vanishes from his hotel overnight, kidnappers demand a ransom, and three days later a Bulgarian writer is found dead in the laureate's clothes; Inspector Vanda Belovska takes the case.
Helikon 2012 · Nominee
Физика на тъгата · Fizika na tagata
Georgi Gospodinov · 44 when first published
Novel · 283 pages
AI-generated summary:A boy speaks from the Minotaur's underground labyrinth, from a cellar at the end of the war, from a basement flat in the 1970s and 1980s and from an old bomb shelter tomorrow, in a novel about empathy and its fading.
Helikon 2012 · Nominee
Noy dava posledni ukazania na zhivotnite
Title translated by AI:“Noah Gives the Animals Their Last Instructions”
Kalin Terziyski · 42 when first published
Novel · 120 pages
Helikon 2012 · Nominee
Ochi na slyap, ezik na bolen
Title translated by AI:“Eyes of the Blind, Tongue of the Sick”
Short stories · 219 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories that gather a gallery of people who refused to iron out their lives, full of wonder and laughter, in a world behind the pages that is not the one we know.
Helikon 2012 · Nominee
Prolom
Title translated by AI:“The Gorge”
Novel · 245 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:At the end of the nineteenth century a railway is to cross the young principality from west to east, but its building is beset by political intrigue, financial schemes and religious prejudice, seen by a monastery novice, a Catholic priest and the author.
Helikon 2012 · Nominee
Smartta ne e za vseki
Title translated by AI:“Death Is Not for Everyone”
Radoslav Parushev · 37 when first published
Short stories · 152 pages
AI-generated summary:Seventeen stories of contemporary city life, written within a few months of 2011; in one of them Umberto Eco turns up as a character and, at the end, brutally kills the author.
Helikon 2012 · Nominee
Zlatniyat dazhd
Title translated by AI:“The Golden Rain”
Novel · 484 pages · Historical, Crime
AI-generated summary:Three linked short crime novels set in Rome, Antioch, Alexandria and Memphis in 193 and 207 AD, beginning as praetorian guards run riot in Rome and three emperors take the throne within months.
Helikon 2012 · Nominee
Simetria
Title translated by AI:“Symmetry”
Zachary Karabashliev · 43 when first published
Short stories · 154 pages
AI-generated summary:Thirteen stories: a cat named Johnny Socks in midnight Brooklyn, two partners facing bankruptcy in California, a freed prisoner heading home to Dobrudzha, a widower visiting his daughter in America, a parking attendant in Varna.
Helikon 2011 · Winner
Degrad
Short stories · 96 pages
AI-generated summary:Thirteen stories written between 2008 and 2010 about the falling apart of the false human persona, ranging from urban gothic and online romantic comedy to feline diabolism and a chemical fairy tale.
Helikon 2011 · Nominee
Dishashtia halm
Title translated by AI:“The Breathing Hill”
Novel · 104 pages
AI-generated summary:A nameless voyeur describes what he sees from his window at night in the outer districts, while Mari, an actress, films video stories with Mr A., a witty gay man nicknamed the Breathing Hill.
Helikon 2011 · Nominee
Kashtata na klounite
Title translated by AI:“The House of the Clowns”
Galin Nikiforov · 43 when first published
Novel · 160 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A strange recluse, in the last days of his life, confesses an extraordinary love and tells of a mysterious house he found as a child, where enigmatic people find peace and perhaps a gateway to eternity.
Helikon 2011 · Nominee
Chekmedzhe za edinichni neshta
Title translated by AI:“A Drawer for Single Things”
Short stories · 264 pages
AI-generated summary:Nineteen present-day Bulgarian parables about life, love and death, about being human in the years of transition and crisis.
Helikon 2011 · Nominee
Ludost
Title translated by AI:“Madness”
Kalin Terziyski · 40 when first published
Novel · 238 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A young doctor spends four years in a psychiatric hospital, as a physician, as a man in love, as someone fighting meaninglessness and searching for meaning.
Helikon 2011 · Nominee
Nashington
Mikhail Veshim · 50 when first published
Novel · 183 pages · Satire, Migration
AI-generated summary:Nashington is a Bulgarian enclave in California, where emigrants who have become Americans, though not quite, keep their rakia, salad and yoghurt.
Helikon 2011 · Nominee
Vazvishenie
Title translated by AI:“Exaltation”
Milen Ruskov · 45 when first published
Novel · 407 pages · Historical, Satire
AI-generated summary:In the age of the Bulgarian National Revival, two rebels, friends of Dimitar Obshti and half revolutionaries, half brigands, take part in the Arabakonak robbery, the start of many adventures, told in the language of the time.
Helikon 2011 · Nominee
Zhivotat ne e za vseki
Title translated by AI:“Life Is Not for Everyone”
Radoslav Parushev · 36 when first published
Short stories · 159 pages
AI-generated summary:Short city stories about the magic hidden in everyday life and the challenge of being alive and being human.
Helikon 2011 · Nominee
Rekonstruktsia
Title translated by AI:“Reconstruction”
Novel · 204 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:An incitement to suicide, a crime that is hard to prove, is examined by splitting the woman who committed it into eight women, each with her own memory of what happened and her own motive: betrayal.
Helikon 2011 · Nominee
Konspiratori
Title translated by AI:“Conspirators”
Zherminal Chivikov · 65 when first published
Novel · 172 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:In 1972 a group of young people in Ruse and Varna set up an illegal organisation against the communist regime, and State Security tracks them down in an operation code-named Conspirators.
Helikon 2011 · Nominee
Rekviem za nikogo
Title translated by AI:“Requiem for No One”
Novel · 288 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:In the mid-1980s, in Prespan, a sleepy town deep in the Bulgarian provinces, the forced renaming of the Turkish minority is in full swing and neighbours who lived in lazy harmony suddenly turn on each other.
Helikon 2010 · Winner
Kolkoto do Shotlandetsa
Title translated by AI:“As for the Scotsman”
Rositsa Tasheva · 64 when first published
Novel · 212 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:The Scotsman, a painter who no longer paints, gets married, looks for work, dreams words, makes the rounds of his favourite bars and tries to sell a picture, needing just two things: money and love.
Helikon 2010 · Nominee
Pyasak i kanela
Title translated by AI:“Sand and Cinnamon”
Short stories · 80 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories gathered from two years of sleepless nights and bouts of madness, scattered with hippie life, sand and music.
Helikon 2010 · Nominee
Sheyset i chetiri hilyadi devetstotin dvayset i osem
Title translated by AI:“Sixty-Four Thousand Nine Hundred and Twenty-Eight”
Boris Rokanov · 48 when first published
Novel · 214 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:The secret world of a child who gathers overheard words, puzzling deeds and strange turns of events and strings them together into a tale, both frightening and funny, called life.
Helikon 2010 · Nominee
Gradche na ime Mendosino
Title translated by AI:“A Little Town Called Mendocino”
Deyan Enev · 49 when first published
Short stories · 96 pages
AI-generated summary:Eighteen stories, among them one in which a father travelling far from home tells his daughter over the phone that their minibus is just passing a little town called Mendocino.
Helikon 2010 · Nominee
Payakat
Title translated by AI:“The Spider”
Hristo Karastoyanov · 60 when first published
Novel · 204 pages
AI-generated summary:In a sleepy provincial Bulgarian town of the transition years, a lonely man whom nobody notices, a reader who never writes, starts handing out what he sees as retribution, while the town's online gossips argue over a brutal murder.
Helikon 2010 · Nominee
Alkohol
Title translated by AI:“Alcohol”
Kalin Terziyski · 40 when first published
Novel · 351 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A psychiatrist and writer tells, without poses, of childhood, love, marriage and friendship amid the social and political hell around him, of his false rescue in alcohol and his long way back to life.
Helikon 2010 · Nominee
Lyubovta na 35-godishnata zhena
Title translated by AI:“The Love of a 35-Year-Old Woman”
Kalin Terziyski · 40 when first published
Short stories · 151 pages
Helikon 2010 · Nominee
Tayniyat pat na mastiloto
Title translated by AI:“The Secret Path of Ink”
Kristin Dimitrova · 47 when first published
Short stories · 272 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:A young woman finds messages meant for her in a newspaper she buys every day, a professor dials a wrong number and reaches a discreet club that grants wishes, and a long-buried murder resurfaces with a photograph.
Helikon 2010 · Nominee
Vazheigrachat Karoy
Title translated by AI:“Karoy the Tightrope Walker”
Short stories · 240 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories of a seaside summer, optimistic science fiction, the recent past and surreal happenings in unexpected places, where everyone waits for Karoy the tightrope walker.
Helikon 2010 · Nominee
Marma, Mariam
Theodora Dimova · 50 when first published
Novel · 256 pages
AI-generated summary:The daughter of a senior State Security officer, her life wrecked after 1989 and herself turned out by her own daughter, finds refuge in a small church by the Black Sea, where she retells the story of Jesus and his mother Miriam.
Helikon 2010 · Nominee
Mazhe
Title translated by AI:“Men”
Novel · 192 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A young woman tries out men the way she tries on clothes from a messy wardrobe, looking for the real one who, like a favourite blouse, is never there when she needs him.
Helikon 2009 · Winner
Kratka istoria na samoleta
Title translated by AI:“A Short History of the Airplane”
Zachary Karabashliev · 41 when first published
Short stories · 124 pages
AI-generated summary:Fifteen stories that move between Bulgaria and America: a childhood café housed in an old aeroplane, a stranger's warmth on a bus, two brothers in love with the same girl, an old couple dancing to jazz in Cincinnati.
Helikon 2009 · Nominee
Novel · 240 pages · Love, Family
AI-generated summary:Ada, Filip, Andrey and Ana must find the strength to forgive the unforgivable, tear down and rebuild, and love despite their fear, in a story of friendship and of parents who lose or find their children again.
Helikon 2009 · Nominee
Tya e tuk
Title translated by AI:“She Is Here”
Elena Alexieva · 34 when first published
Novel · 328 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:A failed photojournalist starts looking into the suicide of a young woman in the metro and slowly finds that the facts have nothing to do with the truth.
Helikon 2009 · Nominee
Fotografat: Obscura reperta
Title translated by AI:“The Photographer: Obscura reperta”
Galin Nikiforov · 41 when first published
Novel · 268 pages
AI-generated summary:Anton Apostolov, a brilliant photographer, follows the trail of an eighteenth-century manuscript by the alchemist Nino Golyardi that tells how to see the Face of Death, torn into three parts so it would never fall into the wrong hands.
Helikon 2009 · Nominee
Ima li koy da vi obicha
Title translated by AI:“Is There Anyone to Love You”
Kalin Terziyski · 39 when first published
Short stories · 160 pages
AI-generated summary:Sixteen stories set in an unfamiliar metropolis that feels like a fairy-tale stage: a lecturer falls for a student nobody dares approach, and a poor scavenger finds a packet of old love letters thrown away in the street.
Helikon 2009 · Nominee
Dnevnikat na edna peperuda
Title translated by AI:“The Diary of a Butterfly”
Krassimir Damianov · 60 when first published
Novel · 442 pages
AI-generated summary:A former writer stranded in Madrid after the fall of the Berlin Wall looks back on his stormy youth in Bulgaria and on a cosmopolitan love that spans thirty-five years and several continents.
Helikon 2009 · Nominee
Skuka. 3 romana
Title translated by AI:“Boredom: Three Novels”
Maria Stankova · 52 when first published
Novel · 280 pages · Love, Crime
AI-generated summary:Three short novels make up one story: a woman tells the tale of a love in its death throes, and is later drawn into two murders.
Helikon 2009 · Nominee
Radoslav Parushev · 34 when first published
Novel · 256 pages · Speculative, Satire
AI-generated summary:In a dystopian Santa Sofia at the start of the twenty-first century, people go wild over a newly found manuscript of the lost second volume of The Brothers Karamazov, and Aleksey K., a recently fired bank clerk, sets out to expose the hoax.
Helikon 2009 · Nominee
Bezprizorni angeli
Title translated by AI:“Homeless Angels”
Short stories · 136 pages
AI-generated summary:Debut stories about ordinary people next door, such as Angel, who spends his nights beside a potato-peeling machine in a salad plant, while stray angels, cherubs, archangels and fallen heroes wander through their everyday lives.
Helikon 2009 · Nominee
Budistki plazh
Title translated by AI:“Buddhist Beach”
Short stories · 132 pages
AI-generated summary:Twenty-five short urban stories, from a dying man's letter to his former love to biblical parody, retro pastiche and fantastic twists, mostly told by a young, educated man from Sofia haunted by mirrors, dreams and death.
Helikon 2009 · Nominee
2084-ta
Vladimir Levchev · 51 when first published
Novel · 206 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:In 2084, in a world split between poor provinces and a rich City of the Immortals, Slav, a lonely believer who can still read, leaves the mafia-run megacity of Montanatown, where his brother Miro is a gangster.
Helikon 2008 · Winner
Kraglata riba
Title translated by AI:“The Round Fish”
Momchil Nikolov · 38 when first published
Novel · 455 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:The soul of an old Chinese woman who dies in New York's Chinatown in the 1960s travels through time and people until it meets an angel, Ramiel, hunted by Marvin, a former secret agent who tells the story.
Helikon 2008 · Nominee
Avantyura, za da mine vremeto
Title translated by AI:“An Adventure to Pass the Time”
Albena Stambolova · 50 when first published
Novel · 301 pages
AI-generated summary:Three families live ordered, airless lives while the old women Mina, Siya and Rahel weave the fate they have planned for everyone, until the children begin to break away and Malina sets off to find the father she has never known.
Helikon 2008 · Nominee
Razkazi pod linia
Title translated by AI:“Stories Below the Line”
Alexander Shpatov · 23 when first published
Short stories · 135 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories in which, just beneath the thin line of the real, the virtual runs riot, set off by a pig that eats the emptiness of the universe.
Helikon 2008 · Nominee
Da sabudish dinozavar
Title translated by AI:“To Wake a Dinosaur”
Novel · 192 pages
Helikon 2008 · Nominee
Sotsroman
Title translated by AI:“Socialist Novel”
Dimitar Shumnaliev · 60 when first published
Novel · 409 pages
AI-generated summary:People whose youth passed under socialism are haunted by their memories of it and by the information they carry, and wonder whether they are to blame for being born into a system that made them its heroes.
Helikon 2008 · Nominee
Ritsaryat, dyavolat, smartta
Title translated by AI:“The Knight, the Devil, Death”
Elena Alexieva · 32 when first published
Novel · 150 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A sleepless night in a chance hotel brings a middle-aged man back to a love he once gave up, and begins the last season of a man who has tried to forget he ever had desires, tied to his unstable wife.
Helikon 2008 · Nominee
Saprotiva.NET
Title translated by AI:“Resistance.NET”
Hristo Karastoyanov · 58 when first published
Novel · 244 pages
AI-generated summary:In a provincial madhouse whose patients include Elvis Presley, an ageing Charlie Chaplin and a hapless Hitler, bureaucrats plan to declare everyone cured and close the place for a property deal, and the patients resist.
Helikon 2008 · Nominee
Goreshto cherveno
Title translated by AI:“Hot Red”
Ivayla Aleksandrova · 56 when first published
Nonfiction · 421 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:Starting from an interview with the widow of the caricaturist Rayko Aleksiev, a journalist's nine-year investigation follows the fate of Bulgaria's intellectuals from 1935 to 1965 through the artist's tragic end.
Helikon 2008 · Nominee
Захвърлен в природата · Zahvarlen v prirodata
Milen Ruskov · 42 when first published
Novel · 294 pages · Historical, Satire
AI-generated summary:In sixteenth-century Seville, Doctor Nicolás Monardes declares the tobacco newly brought from the Americas a cure for everything, and with his assistant Da Silva, a rogue who tells the story, sets out to treat thirty-six diseases with it.
Helikon 2008 · Nominee
Glednata tochka na Gogen
Title translated by AI:“Gauguin's Point of View”
Viktor Paskov · 59 when first published
Short stories · 173 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories whose characters, citizens of the world, travel between Berlin and Sozopol, Sydney and Borovets, Montpellier and a Sofia hospital, yet always come home; in the title story a narrator and a reclusive painter clash over what true art is.
Helikon 2008 · Nominee
9 зайци · 9 zaytsi
Novel · 206 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Six-year-old Manda grows up on the Black Sea coast in 1960s communist Bulgaria under a harsh grandmother; decades later, a woman in her forties in Sofia, she tries to put her life back together after her marriage ends.
Helikon 2008 · Nominee
18% сиво · 18% sivo
Zachary Karabashliev · 40 when first published
Novel · 264 pages · Love, Crime
AI-generated summary:Days after the love of his life has left him, Zack, a former photographer working for a Californian drug company, crosses into Mexico to drown his grief, and after a wild night in Tijuana escapes a bloody fight in his attackers' van.
Helikon 2007 · Winner
Proklyatieto na zhabata
Title translated by AI:“The Curse of the Frog”
Emil Andreev · 50 when first published
Novel · 333 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:In the mid-1960s a gruesome murder shakes the provincial town of Olm, and young Mihail Obretenov sees the killer in a dream, the first of the visions that will haunt him all his life.
Helikon 2006 · Winner
Chitatelska grupa 31
Title translated by AI:“Reading Group 31”
Elena Alexieva · 30 when first published
Short stories · 224 pages
AI-generated summary:A husband who does not exist, a piano nobody buys, a nightmare clumsily traded, a scruffy intellectual forgotten in a second-hand bookshop: the characters of stories held together by imagination and irony.
Helikon 2005 · Winner
Autopsia na edna lyubov
Title translated by AI:“Autopsy of a Love”
Viktor Paskov · 56 when first published
Novel · 442 pages
AI-generated summary:Charlie, a Bulgarian jazz musician living in Germany, comes home on his annual leave and meets Ina, a fatal woman with an appetite for erotic experiment, in a story of passion, music, friendship and death.
Helikon 2004 · Winner
Gospodi, pomiluy
Title translated by AI:“Lord, Have Mercy”
Deyan Enev · 44 when first published
Short stories · 168 pages
AI-generated summary:Stories and novellas about city outcasts, a nurse in a psychiatric hospital, a ragged boy loitering by a market café and an old monk in a half-deserted monastery, people whose meek, unlucky lives quietly plead for mercy.
Helikon 2003 · Winner
Porazhenieto
Title translated by AI:“The Defeat”
Nonfiction · 367 pages
AI-generated summary:An autobiographical chronicle of the 'short century', in which the author recounts his own life with nearly all the names changed, setting out to write nothing but the truth.
Helikon 2002 · Winner
Nivo za naprednali
Title translated by AI:“Advanced Level”
Alek Popov · 36 when first published
Short stories · 231 pages
AI-generated summary:Unusual stories set in Sofia, Kragujevac, Kosovo, Rhodes, London, New York and outer space, among them one about a cosmonaut who is forced to feed on his own body.