We like it when our friends do well.
Miroslav Penkov, Assistant Prorfessor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas, has done very well indeed. He is this year’s recipient of the BBC Interntational Short Story Award for his story “East of the West” from his anthology of the same title.The award carries with it a hefty British sterling 15,000. (Sorry, I don’t know how to make the symbol on this blog program.) That’s real money.
Miro, who read at a WordSpace Salon in March, 2012, is no stranger to awards and recognition. He was born in Bulgaria in 1982 and attended the first English language high school in Sofia. In 2001 he came to the United States and attended the University of Arkansas. I suppose culture shock is good for aspiring writers. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing after receiving his B.A. in Psychology. HIs earliest short stories appeared in many anthologies, including Best American Short Stories 2008. He won a Eudora Welty Award and in this past year was included in the PEN/O’Henry anthology. 
“East of the West” was the unanimous choice of the BBC panel of judges. In writing about the award, committe chair Michele Roberts said
‘The judges were unanimous in their choice of Miro’s story ‘East of the West’, as the winner, as it so ambitiously and successfully united personal and political life, joining inner and outer worlds through its deployment of different kinds of realism: social and magical and folkloric. The narrator’s voice is unforgettable, his bleak vision redeemed by a strength of feeling that is unusual and unfashionable in modern fiction.’
Your can read more about the BBC International Short Story Award here
A reading of Miro’s prizewinning story has been taken off the BBC radio site, but you can read his story “Makedonija” online at FiveChapters.com. And of course his book East of the West is available at all finer book stores in hardback, paperback, and electronic formats.
Congratulations again to Miroslav Penkov, HIs reading at the WordSpace Salon was one of the most enjoyable evenings we have had in the past year. We wish him the best of luck and continued success.