Assoc. Prof. Dr. Angel Igov (b. 1981) is the author of three novels, Particulate Matter (2017), The Meek (2015) and A Short Tale of Shame (2011), two collections of short stories, Encounters on the Road (2002) and K. (2006), and the academic study Flags and Keys: Poetics of the Epigraph (2022). The Meek was nominated for seven national fiction prizes in Bulgaria and won one of them, the Hristo G. Danov award. Its translation into German by Andreas Tretner was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and shared the International Literary Award of the House of World Cultures in Berlin (2020). Particulate Matter was nominated in the Novel of the Year competition.
Igov teaches English literature and translation at Sofia University. He used to be a literary observer for a number of print and electronic media. He translates prose and poetry from English. He was awarded the Krustan Dyankov Grand Prize for Translation in 2016 for his translation of The Collector of Lost Things by Jeremy Page. In 2018, he won the Special Prize from the same competition for his translation of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Igov was a visiting researcher at the University of California Berkeley on a Fulbright grant in 2011; in 2022 he was among the resident writers of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In 2023 he was a Landis & Gyr Foundation Fellow at the literary residency in Zug, Switzerland, where he worked on translating selected poems by Seamus Heaney.
Photo courtesy to Ivaylo Hranov.