Elisaveta Bagryana , born Elisaveta Lyubomirova Belcheva, was a Bulgarian poet who wrote her first verses while living with her family in Veliko Tarnovo in 1907–08. She, along with Dora Gabe, is considered one of the "first ladies of Bulgarian women's literature". She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times.
Life
Elisaveta Lyubomirova Belcheva was born on April 16, 1893 in Sofia, Bulgaria in clerk's family. She finished her primary and secondary education in the capital city. She lived a year with her family in the town of Tarnovo, where she wrote her first poems. Between 1910 and 1911 she taught in the village of Aftani, where she experienced rural life, after which she studied Slavic philology at Sofia University. Her first poems — Why and Night Song — were published in 1915 in the magazineContemporary Thought. It was after World War I ended that she truly entered into the literary world, at a time when poetry was undergoing a transformation. By 1921, she was already active in the literary life, and was collaborating on the Newspaper of the Woman and the magazine Modernity, among other publications. With the arrival of her first book, The Eternal and the Holy, she earned the confirmation of her peers. She also started writing children's stories. Her poems are straightforward, sensitive and serious, as in The Well, a fable-like piece relating a well she dug when a little girl to the wellspring of poetry in her soul. They often are undeniably feminine – as in the poem The Eternal, in which the writer contemplates the body of a dead mother, or Evening Prayer – and spirited, as shown by the youthful, rebellious spirit in The Elements. , in which Bagriana lived and worked from 1957 to 1991 Bagryana passed her life surrounded by words, editing a number of magazines and writing. Her works have been translated into over 30 languages. Her poems are most recently available in a book entitled Penelope of the 21st Century: Selected poems of Elisaveta Bagryana, translated by Brenda Walker. Bagryana was a friend of Pétar Russév, father of Brazilian politician Dilma Rousseff, who won election as Brazil's first female President on 31 October 2010.
Works in English
Penelope of the twentieth century: selected poems of Elisaveta Bagryana translators Brenda Walker, Belin Tonchev, Valentine Borrisov, Forest, 1993.
Voices of Sibyls: Three Bulgarian Poets--Elisaveta Bagryana, Nevena Stefanova, Snezhina Slavova, Translator Yuri Vidov Karageorge, Morris Pub., 1996.
