Georgi Tenev


Georgi Tenev is a Bulgarian novelist, short story writer, playwright and film/TV screenwriter.
Major topics in Tenev’s works are the cultural and ideological void in the post-totalitarian societies and the consequent emerging of counter-cultures; the fall of utopias and the social amnesias. Recurring narratives in his novels and plays are also quasi-religion and disbelief, barbarism and revolution, the Holocaust, problem of evil, theodicy. In his recent writings he often addresses environmental issues.
His collection Holy Light is a book of science fiction short stories featuring mainly issues of political correctness/incorrectness and biopolitics treated in a provocative way: racism, ownership over human’s reproductive functions, sexual difference, discrimination, violence. Other topics addressed in the story collection are pain and eroticism and different political and cultural values attributed to sexuality. In 2010 translator Angela Rodel was awarded with a PEN Translation Fund Grant to support the translation of the book.
Tenev’s novel Party Headquarters deals with the social paradoxes of the post-communist Bulgarian society. The key metaphor here is the Chernobyl disaster. It won the Vick Foundation Award for Novel of the Year. "Georgi Tenev examines the most recent past by avoiding taboos and using distinct words – it is a philosophical dealing with memory which uses powerful imagery."
In August 2011 "Returning to the Hague" from the Holy Light collection was published in the online edition of Granta. "On the Beautiful Blue Danube" from the same collection appeared in 2014 Issue of Bat City Review.
Wittenberg Revisited is Georgi Tenev and Ivan Dobchev’s "intelligent Stoppardian appropriation of Hamlet" premiered in 2011. The play received the National Literature Prize „Elias Canetti“ 2013. This "local spin-off" by Georgi Tenev and Ivan Dobchev "testify to Shakespeare’s permeation in Bulgarian culture".
Tenev co-wrote the script for Alienation ; the film premiered internationally in the Official Selection of Venice Days in the frame of the 70th edition of the Venice Film Festival. By the end of the year 2013 Alienation won four international awards.

Books

Books by Tenev include: