Holy Light

“Alloying political sci-fi with striking eroticism, the stories in Holy Light depict a world of endless, wearying revolution and apocalypse.”

PEN Translation Fund, announcing Translation Grant Winner Angela Rodel 


“Utterly fascinating. Irony is combined with sincerity, realism and expressive detail with fantasy and dream. There is something very bracing, strange, it has irony and a complete kind of hilarity and sincerity about it – I was very, very struck.” 

Siri Hustvedt on “Returning from the Hague,” a story from Holy Light published in GRANTA online 


Georgi Tenev is a novelist, playwright and film screenwriter. His novel Mr. M (2010) is about the fate of Georgi Markov – a Bulgarian émigré-writer who was killed in London at the height of the Cold War. M.’s story brings together diverse themes: the saving of the Bulgarian Jews, Prague Spring, the propagandistic power of television, the bankruptcy of socialist literature. 

Party Headquarters (2006) won the VIC Bulgarian Novel of the Year Award. 

Georgi Tenev writes plays that have been produced by leading Bulgarian directors. The renowned theatre troupe Sfumato has toured stages in Paris, Nancy and St. Petersburg with his works.