(1936 - 2007)

Nikolai Kantchev was born in the village of Byala voda near Pleven. He studied Bulgarian Language and Literature at Sofia University. Since 1957 he began publishing his own poetic works as well as his translations of poetry. The very first collections of Kantchev’s poetry (Prisastvie [Presence] 1965 and Kolkoto sinapenoto zarno [Like Wild Mustard Seed] 1968) revealed a decisively new for Bulgarian poetry by that time absurdist and nonsensical poetics. Notwithstanding the prolonged period in which his works were rejected and not published (1968-1980), N. Kantchev managed to create a number of poetry collections and leave his vibrant poetic mark on several decades: Poslanie ot peshehodets [Message from a Pedesrian] (1980), Noshten pazach na zorata [Night Guard of Dawn] (1983), Vulni na veroyatnostta [Waves of Probability] (1985), Vremeto, razdadeno na vsichki [The Time Allocated to Everyone] (1989), V gorata ima nyakoi [There’s Somebody in the Forest] (1990), I mezhduochieto da progleda [The Look from Between the Eyes] (1991), Balat na nevinnite [The Innocents’ Ball] (1992), Byalata akatsiya ot Byala cherkva [White Acacia from Byala Cherkva] (1994), Galaktizirane na praznotata [Galaxifying Emptiness] (1996), Usmivkata na Sfinksa [The Smile of the Sphinx] (1998), Patuvaneto na mitarya [Journey of the Sinner] (1999) among many others. His Izbrani stihotvoreniya 1965-2006 [Select Poems] were published in 2006.



The philosophical poetry of Nikolai Kantchev builds a bridge between the classical poetic models of P. P. Slaveikov and Atanas Dalchev, the aesthetics of the avant-garde and post-modern experimentation in Bulgarian poetry.



N. Kantchev is translator of the Anthology of Georgian Poets, the anthology Five Contemporary French Poets and he edited together with the literary critic Svetlozar Igov the anthology Five Contemporary Serbian Poets. He introduced a number of French, English and Polish poets to Bulgarian readers in separate volumes.



Nikolai Kantchev’s works have been translated and rendered in English by Teodor Petkov, Jascha Kessler and Alexander Shurbanov, Yordan Kosturkov, Tzveta Botcheva, Kenneth White, Georgi Belev and Theodore Weiss.

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