Lit in Translation

All prizes Bulgaria

Helikon Award for New Bulgarian Prose

Награда „Хеликон“ за нова българска художествена проза

Bulgaria · Since 2002 · For books in Bulgarian

Awarded each December by the Helikon bookshop chain in Sofia to a new book of Bulgarian fiction published that year: a novel, a collection of stories or memoir prose. A jury of five nominates twelve books over the year and names the winner from them.

The Helikon bookshop chain founded the award in 2002 to support new Bulgarian fiction of high artistic merit. Any Bulgarian author whose publisher distributes the book through Helikon's shops can take part, and novels, story collections, memoirs, documentary prose and fictionalised biographies are all eligible. A jury of five writers and critics nominates three new books in the middle of each quarter, and at the end of the year chooses the winner from the twelve nominees at a ceremony in Sofia shortly before Christmas. The winner receives a bronze eagle by the sculptor and writer Evgeni Kuzmanov, passed on by the previous winner, and 3,000 leva. In 2018 the jury gave no award, as it could not agree. A separate readers' award, the Flower of Helikon, goes to the best-selling nominee.

Winners in English
2 of 23
Years on this site
2002–2025

Winners and nominees

Stage

Showing 5 of 196 books. 191 aren’t in English yet: show all.

2022 1 of 11 books

  • In English

    Helikon 2022 · Nominee

    The Wolves of Staro Selo

    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.

2012 1 of 11 books

  • In English

    Helikon 2012 · Nominee

    The Physics of Sorrow

    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.

2008 3 of 11 books

  • In English

    Helikon 2008 · Nominee

    Thrown into Nature

    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.

  • In English

    Helikon 2008 · Nominee

    Nine Rabbits

    9 зайци · 9 zaytsi

    Virginia Zaharieva

    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.

  • In English

    Helikon 2008 · Nominee

    18% Gray

    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.