Bio note

Elvira Bormann was born in Dresden and has graduated Translation with Bulgarian and Russian in the University of Leipzig. Since then she has been working professionally as a translator from and into Bulgarian. The past five years she has been working as a translator-announcer in the German editorial office of Radio Sofia and for 16 years - in the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission.

She has been translating Bulgarian literature into German since 2006 and her translations have been published in magazines, short story collections and as stand-alone books. She has translated works by Georgi Tenev, Fedya Filkova, Todora Radeva, Todor P. Todorov, Natalia Deleva, Jordan D. Radichkov, Ina Valchanova, Zdravka Evtimova, Emanuil Vidinsky and others. Her last two publications are children's books.

Elvira has participated in two Bulgarian-German translation workshops - one in Switzerland and one Bulgaria, has been nominated twice for the award 'Peroto' in the category 'Translation from Bulgarian into a foreign language", and in 2023 she was awarded by the Union of Translators in Bulgaria and the Ministry of Culture.

Residency goals

During her creative residency in Sofia, Elvira plans to work on the translation of Justine Tom's novel 'Clair de lune', which will be published by Еta Verlag, Berlin. She has many ideas for books by contemporary Bulgarian authors that she would like to translate but hopes to target those for which a future publication is most likely. She looks forward to interesting meetings with authors, translators and the Sofia Literary Agency.

The residency is supported by the project Archipelagos, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union and by the National Culture Fund, Bulgaria.