Rolex Arts Festival | Public Talk: Fiction and locality in a global context

The US-based Bulgarian author Miroslav Penkov, who writes both in Bulgarian and in English, and whose books were praised in the United States but also acclaimed in his homeland, discusses with his Greek translator Akis Papantonis about the problems of fiction writing through borders and languages, and the effort to universalise a local language of symbols and myths.

Speaker: Miroslav Penkov, Literature protégé 2014 - 2015
After moving from Bulgaria to the United States at age 19 to study psychology, Miroslav Penkov turned to literature to "give voice to a voiceless people" by writing about Bulgaria. His award-winning short story collection East of the West: A Country in Stories (2011) has been translated into more than twenty languages. His novel Stork Mountain (2016) has been praised as a "Bulgarian Don Quixote". A faculty member at the University of North Texas, he has helped his students gain tenure-track positions, secure major publishers, and option their work to producers. Miroslav Penkov was mentored by Michael Ondaatje in 2014-2015.

Speaker: Akis Papantonis
Akis Papantonis, born 1978 in Athens, Greece, holds the Chair of Translational Epigenetics at the Medical Faculty of the University of Goettingen. He has published two novels, Karyotype (Kichli Eds. 2014 - "Anagnostis" First Book Award) and Shallow waters, shadows (Kichli Eds., 2019), and one collection of poetry, bildungsroman (Kichli Eds., 2021). He has translated the works of Miroslav Penkov (East of the West, Antipodes 2016 and Stork Mountain, Antipodes 2018) and an anthology of Raymond Carver's poetry (Where they had lived, Kichli Eds. 2020) into Greek.

Moderator:Kostas Spatharakis, Editor, translator and founder of Antipodes Publications and member of the Rolex Arts Festival Advisory Committee.
Kostas Spatharakis was born in Athens, Greece, in 1980. He studied Law in Athens and Comparative Literature in Thessaloniki. He worked for many years as freelance translator and proofreader, and in 2014 he founded Antipodes, an independent publishing house, based in Athens.

Presented by Rolex in partnership with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC)

Full Rolex Arts Festival program