Virginia Zaharieva was born in Sofia in 1959. She is a writer, psychotherapist, feminist, and mother. Her novel Nine Rabbits is among the most celebrated Bulgarian books to appear over the past two decades and the first of Zaharieva’s work made available in North America.
Angela Rodel earned a BA from Yale University and a MA from UCLA, both in linguistics. She won a Fulbright fellowship to study Bulgarian at Sofia University in 1996 and returned to Bulgaria on a Fulbright–Hays Fellowship in 2004 where she still resides and works as a literary translator of note. Rodel won a PEN Translation Fund Grant from the American PEN Foundation for Holy Light, a collection of stories by Georgi Tenev—the first time a Bulgarian work has received this award. Her translations of Milen Rouskov’s novel Thrown into Nature, Zachary Karabashliev’s 18% Gray, and Angel Igov’s A Short Tale of Shame are published by Open Letter Books.