Biography

Georgi Tenev (born 9 October 1969, in Sofia, Bulgaria) 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. He is born in 1969 in Sofia. He is the son of Tenyo Tenev and Bozhanka Konstantinova, a descendant of the poet Nikolai Liliev and the literary historian Georgi Konstantinov. In 1988 graduated from the H. Konstantin-Kyril Philosopher High School for Languages and Culture and Philological Studies at Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski” (1989–1991). In 1994 he was one of the graduates in the experimental class of Margarita Mladenova and Ivan Dobchev at the National Academy for Theater and Film Arts. He was elected a Herder Fellow by the Bulgarian Herder Award winner Konstantin Iliev and continued his studies at the University of Vienna in 1996/97.

He was a playwright at the Sfumato Theater Workshop (1997–1999) and an assistant at the National Academy of Theater and Film Arts in Sofia (1997–2002).

Since 1994 Georgi Tenev has been a freelance writer, playwright, screenwriter, and publicist. His novels and plays are winners of the most prestigious national awards for prose and drama: VICK Novel of the Year, the Elias Canetti Prize, the Askeer Academy Award.

His novels have been translated into English (Open Letter Books), Spanish (Baile del Sol), and German (eta Verlag, Berlin); the collection of stories was distinguished by the American PEN/Heim Translation Grant; the stories have been published in Bat City Review, Ninth Letter Anthology, Words Without Borders (USA), and Granta (UK). His dramaturgical sequel to Hamlet is noted in The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare.

Writes for the magazines and newspapers Kultura, Edno, Altera, Dnevnik, Literaturen Vestnik, Christianity and Culture (co-founder and editorial board member), Sfumato (co-founder).

Since 2013 he is a curator for projects at the: Sofia City Art Gallery, The Red House, L’Europeo. Tenev was a distinguished Guest Lecturer at the Sozopol Fiction Seminar (2014, 2018). In 2017–2019 led classes in creative writing. He was a program Director for the Practical Dramaturgy Club – New Bulgarian University (2018).

His collection Holy Light (Altera, 2009) 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 (Altera 2007) 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 (2007). "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 (Otchuzhdenie); the film premiered internationally in the Official Selection of Venice Days ('le Giornate degli Autori') in the frame of the 70th edition of the Venice Film Festival. By the end of the year 2013 Alienation won four international awards.