Her fellow judge, the novelist Ross Raisin, praised the story's "understatedness".
Penkov's story "so ambitiously and successfully united personal and political life, joining inner and outer worlds through its deployment of different kinds of realism: social and magical and folkloric," she said. Judges for the BBC prize, chaired by Clive Anderson, chose him as their unanimous winner for what novelist Michèle Roberts called his narrator's "unforgettable" voice, "his bleak vision redeemed by a strength of feeling that is unusual and unfashionable in modern fiction". Now an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas, Penkov's stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2008, and have been collected in East of the West: A Country in Stories, published in the UK by Sceptre. "Moving to America, suddenly I felt so removed from everyone I cared about, and writing was the only way I knew to cross the ocean, to shorten the distance," he said. Although he had been writing in Bulgarian, it took some convincing from one of his professors for him to continue in English. Penkov moved from Bulgaria to America in 2001, at the age of 18, to study at the University of Arkansas. It's a very sprawling story, in which I tried to show myself how to take life's losses and not view them as punishments but as something liberating, and ultimately leading to freedom."
"I used this as the basis for the story, but I wanted to inject my own life into it, myself, abroad in America and in many ways alone, with a huge body of water between me and the people I love. Every five years they would hold a reunion allowed by both governments, because 70 years ago they were one village – part of Bulgaria," said Penkov. "Years ago I read a newspaper article about two villages, one in Bulgaria, one over the border in Serbia.
0 kommentar(er)
