A Hermit Took the Vick Prize for Best Bulgarian Novel

By: Svetlana Dicheva, Bulgarian National Radio

For a second year in a row, the Vick Prize for the Best Bulgarian Novel of the year has been quite a sensation. For the first time in many years, Bulgarian novelists have a stimulus to write: the prize amounts to BGN 10 000 (EUR 5 000), a sum of money unattainable under the present conditions in Bulgaria, and translation of the novel into English, which is a chance for the book to be published abroad. This year the four-member jury singled out the novel “The Glass River” by Emil Andreev, a forty-nine year old English Language and Literature graduate, who has worked as a teacher, journalist, translator and lecturer of English at the Theology Department of the Sofia University. According to the critics, although it is the authors’s first try in the novel genre, the book is a successful combination of pleasant reading and deep textual layers offering philosophical overtones. Emil Andreev is considered a master of suspense and mystery, a fact proven by the public vote – he won the Vick Readers’ Prize as well.

Emil Andreev is a very sociable person. Being a play-writer, he has many friends in the artistic and intellectual circles. His life alternates between the noisy existence in the capital city and long periods of isolation in the mountain where he has …only one neighbour and no electricity. This love for solitude and meditation has given his friends the cause to call him “the Hermit”. Svetlana Dicheva from the Bulgarian National Radio asked the happy laureate some questions.