Miroslav Penkov

Miroslav Penkov is a Bulgarian writer who writes in English and Bulgarian. He was born in Gabrovo, Bulgaria in 1982, lived in Sofia for fourteen years and in 2001, at the age of 18, moved to the United States of America.

Awards and honors In 2007, his short story "Buying Lenin" won The Southern Review's Eudora Welty Prize in Fiction. Later, Salman Rushdie included "Buying Lenin" in The Best American Short Stories 2008.

In 2012, his story "East of the West" won the BBC International Short Story Award. In the US, the story was anthologized in the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012 and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013.

In 2014, Penkov was selected as a protégé by mentor Michael Ondaatje as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, an international philanthropic program that pairs masters in their disciplines with emerging talents for a year of one-to-one creative exchange.

His debut story collection East of the West (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2011) has been published in seventeen countries.

Penkov's short story "A Picture with Yuki" was adapted into a feature film of the same title. A Bulgarian-Japanese production, the film was directed by Lachezar Avramov and starred Rushi Vidinliev, Kiki Sugino, Dimiter Marinov, and Bulgarian boxing legend Serafim Todorov.

Works East of the West: A Country in Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2011 (US, first edition). Stork Mountain: A Novel, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016 (US, first edition).