Mirela
Ivanova was born on May 11, 1962 in Sofia. She started publishing poems in the
magazine "Native speech" as a student at the German high school. Her
first collection of poems "Stone Wings" was published in 1985.
Author
of nine poetry books, the most famous of which are Solitary Game, Memory for
Details, Disassembling the Toys, Eclectics, Seven.
She
also published two collections of stories: Slowly
and All Stories Are For You, and
two volumes of journalistic texts.
She
is the winner of national and international prizes for poetry: the Prize for
Modern Poetry from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, the National Prize
"Hristo G. Danov", the Sofia Prize for Literature, the prizes for
poetry "Nikolai Kanchev" and "Peroto" for "SEDEM.
Poems (with) biographies'.
At
the end of 2022, she was nominated for the prestigious "European Poet of
Freedom" award, which will be presented in 2024 in the city of Gdansk,
Poland. The nomination includes the translation and publication of a book in
Polish.
She
is a participant in a number of prestigious European literary forums such as
"Europe Writes", "Poetry in the City",
"Donumenta", "Fragile". In 2008, she received a one-year
writing scholarship from the Bavarian Ministry of Culture at the International
Creative Home "Villa Concordia" in Bamberg.
Mirela
Ivanova's poems and stories have been translated and published in many
languages, they are included in a number of representative anthologies of
Bulgarian and European poetry and prose.
She
has two poetry books published in Germany: A Lonely Game and Coming to
Terms With the Cold, translated by Norbert Randow and Gaby Tiemann.
Mirela
Ivanova worked for more than fifteen years as the chief curator of the
"Ivan Vazov" house museum in Sofia.
Since
2016, she has been a playwright at the "Ivan Vazov" National Theater,
on whose Chamber Stages her plays Oh,
you, whoever you are... and Footnotes
are performed with great success.
