CULTURE

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.

I didn't know I had a problem until the telephone call. It was 2:31 am. I know the exact time because we have a digital clock by our bedside phone. I lay in bed next to Linda in my mismatched pyjamas because we'd come home slightly drunk at midnight from Baltazar, and I couldn't find a top to match the bottom. My three glasses of wine helped me forget the evening's unpleasantness at the Booth Theater, and I had just drifted off to sleep behind my cloth eye shades. That's when the phone rang.

His short stories were nominated for the debut book competition of Ars Publishing House and his play Separation at First Sight was one of five nominees for the Slavka Slavova chamber play competition of Theater 199 in the spring of 2010. He was one of the top five in the Sofia Poetics Festival contest. In the same year his play The Eyes of the Others was one of the five nominees in the competition of Theater Sofia.

A baby's howl rang out from the neighbouring room.

Fairly Gently appeared in 2003 and won a special award in the Razvitie literature competition. Good Guy (2006) won the Sveltostrui award in 2008. In 2009 The Photographer: Obscura Reperta was published and Loser's Summer in 2010. Galin Nikiforov has twice been nominated for the Helikon award, twice for the VIK Novel of the Year and once for the Elias Canetti literature competition.

Her short story collection Bitter Sky was published in 2003, while Somebody Else appeared in 2004. Her novel God of Traitors was published in 2006 and the short story collection Miss Daniella in 2007. Vassil was a prizewinner in the BBC World Short Story Competition in 2005, while It's Your Turn was successful in the international short story competition Utopia 2005 in Nantes, France. 200,000 won the special prize in the short story competition Lege Artis in Leipzig, Germany, 2000.

I was walking down the street and the sun was angrily hammering through my eyelids. I wasn't thinking about anything. Well, actually a great little story a friend of mine told me recently popped into my head. It went like this:

On a chichi street, in a posh and trendy bar, two friends met up. Businessmen, yuppies, stock-brokers. Obscenely rich. One of them was wearing the perfect jacket. The cloth, the colour, the length. An absolute gem. One-of-a-kind. His friend gazed at it admiringly and asked:

"Where did you get that jacket? It's amazing!"

The first surprise comes when you look at the pictures. This is another Bulgaria, with mellower light, sombre people and the nostalgic atmosphere of the 1950s. Little details like a chipped pavement or a drab house have been turned into a backdrop for the people who feature in almost every picture. The result is outstanding. Warm and realistic, the pictures make you want to take in the world through these eyes.