Elisaveta Bagriana

Elisaveta Bagryana, born Elisaveta Lyubomirova Belcheva, was a Bulgarian poet who wrote her first verses while living with her family in Veliko Tarnovo in 1907-08. She, along with Dora Gabe (1886–1983), is considered one of the Bulgarian mothers of literature.

Bagryana taught in the village of Aftane, where she experienced rural life, from 1910 to 1911, after which she studied Slavic philology at Sofia University. Her first poems were published in 1915 – Why (Zashto) and Night Song (Vecherna pesen) – in the magazine Contemporary Thought (Suvremenna misul).

It was after World War I ended that she truly entered into the literary world, at a time when poetry was undergoing a transformation. By 1921, she was already active in the literary life, and was collaborating on the Newspaper of the Woman and the magazine Modernity, among other publications.

With the arrival of her first book, The Eternal and the Holy (Vechnata i svyatata, 1927), she earned the confirmation of her peers. She also started writing children’s stories. Her poems are straightforward, sensitive and serious, as in The Well (Klandenetsut), a fable-like piece relating a well she dug when a little girl to the wellspring of poetry in her soul. They often are undeniably feminine – as in the poem The Eternal, in which the writer contemplates the body of a dead mother, or Evening Prayer – and spirited, as shown by the youthful, rebellious spirit in The Elements.

Bagriana passed her life surrounded by words, editing a number of magazines and writing. Her works have been translated into over 30 languages. Her poems are most recently available in a book entitled Penelope of the 21st Century: Selected poems of Elisaveta Bagryana, translated by Brenda Walker.

In 1969, she won a gold medal from the National Association of Poets in Rome. She was also the second of three Bulgarians nominated for a Nobel Prize.