CULTURE

Back then I was broke, even broker than usual. Completely broke. This situation landed me straight behind the reception desk of a crappy hotel in the run-down part of downtown – where Sofia's buildings had shown enviable determination and had thumbed their noses at the bombs. Where Churchill said he planned to plant potatoes, I started working (relatively speaking) as an administrator. It was only for a month's rent's time, that reassured me, as did the word "administrator." The hotel wasn't from the time of the air-raids, but everyone thought it was. It was easy to get confused.

A biographical novel of Lev Tolstoy

Chapter 1

The engine shed in Yasenki was a low, gray building made of slatboard next to the rail line. A set of tracks emerged from beneath the door and angled onto the main set that led north. The door was slightly ajar. Several lines of footprints in the snow led across the tracks and to the doorway. Lev tied off his horse and followed the prints to the open doorway.

I'm almost finished delivering Literary Newspaper. After stopping off at the Youth Theater, I take a detour through the Ladies' Market, it's dusk, all sorts of shady characters are coming out, hawking stuff on tarps, you can even buy yourself a Latin American dictionary for five bucks. I stroll through the darkening market, the vendors are packing up their stalls, others are letting down the shutters, I spot a little fish stand and head over to it.

This is the second Krastan Dyankov Award for Vasileva, who won the prize in 2008. Vasileva is among the finest English-language literature translators in recent decades. She has worked on more than 55 literature pieces by James Joyce, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, Somerset Maugham and others.

The special prize went to Aglika Markova for her translation of Life According to Lubka by Laurie Graham.

A recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, she has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, as well as residencies at Yaddo and the Hermitage. She lives in Massachusetts with her two children and is currently at work on her second novel.

They stepped out of the door and the wind howled around them with a sound like that of a train going past. Off the porch, to the west, the surf ran in a wide torrent, awash with wreckage from the houses on the dunes.

He has lived in Spain since 1990. He is the owner and manager of the Cultural Society Arthostal in Barcelona. He is the author of five books: Why There Is No God (1981), Devil's Nail (1985), Tales for Children who Don't Want To Eat (1989), Diary of a Butterfly (2008) and The House of the Hanged (2009).

The letter arrived in a handmade envelope sealed with red wax. Flipping through the bills and junk mail, Aya saw her name penned in perfectly shaped characters, tore open the seal, and read:

Dear Kawaguchi-sama,

I feel I must bypass the convention of commenting on the weather as I begin this letter because a more pressing matter is probably concerning you, that of my identity and purpose. I write in the spirit of greatest hope, and am aiming to reach the Ms Aya Kawaguchi who was a student of Keio University in 1969. If this is not she, please ignore this letter.

An exhibition of early 20th Century photography, The Archives of the Planet, has been the talk of the town throughout the summer. The exhibition, curated by noted Bulgarian photographer Ivo Hadzhimishev and organised by the French Embassy and the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture, was on display at the National Art Gallery in Sofia, and is scheduled to travel to Sozopol, Varna, Dobrich, Veliko Tarnovo, Elena, Plovdiv and Stara Zagora.

His collection of short stories Brief History of the Airplane (Кратка история на самолета, Ciela Publishing) won the 2009 Helikon Award. His story Metastases has been shortlisted by the editors at the American publisher Dalkey Archive Press for inclusion in Best European Fiction. His recent book Recoil (Откат, Ciela Publishing, 2010), a collection of plays and dialogues, came out in December.

I was deep under the ocean when The Italian Gentleman first arrived and enraged at him for pulling me up. The plants had such colours – purples and scarlets and deep indigos – and the fish such strange shapes and spoke to me. I would have cried in my frustration, but though I floated through each sodden day, inside me was desert. The Italian Gentleman came and brought smells with him. Strongest was the smell of his cigarettes. They smelled like the land, as tobacco does, but of a strange land, not the one I knew. A spiced land, with odd creatures that burrow in it.