Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow

“Masterful, a dazzling feat of mythmaking, told in sentences that come down like gorgeous hammers. lana Boukova’s elemental, cradle-to-grave Balkan stories—stories about storytelling itself—brim with history, folklore, fate, and the primordial. Ekaterina Petrova’s translation brilliantly carries Boukova’s singular voice into an English that’s carnal, incantatory, and more than a little dangerous.“—Izidora Angel

”Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow is one of the most important, valuable, and beautiful contemporary Bulgarian novels.“—Mitko Novkov

“We are simultaneously the spiderweb and the spider, Boukova’s poetic work seems to indicate, with its continuous engendering of connections. It transforms the trivial and self-evident, adds itself to the mystery without solving it, aware that it is a part of it, expounding an unrelenting logic.“—Katerina lliopoulou

Iana Boukova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1968. She is the author of two short-story collections and five books of poetry, most recently Black Haiku. Her poetry collection Notes of the Phantom Woman, which received the prestigious Ivan Nikolov National Poetry Award, was published in English by Ugly Duckling Presse. Boukova has a degree in classics and has translated into Bulgarian Sappho’s fragments, the collected poetry of Catullus, and Pindar’s Pythian Odes. She lives between Sofia and Athens.

Ekaterina Petrova holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship. Her writings and translations have appeared in Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Modern Poetry in Translation, EuropeNow, Reading in Translation, European Literature Network, Exchanges, and elsewhere. Her translation of Iana Boukova’s Notes of the Phantom Woman (co-translated with John O’Kane from the Greek) was published in 2024. She lives in Sofia.

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