For a thousand years Bulgaria represented the border between Christian Europe, Orthodox Russia and Ottoman Islam. During the Cold War it was on the front-line between East and West. Today it represents the vivid clash of the traditional and the Modern. Bulgaria is now our near neighbour and a fellow member of the EU. A new generation of Bulgarian writers are beginning to make their voices heard on the international stage.
Kristin Dimitrova is a Balkan minimalist, a feminist-fabulist whose work combines the fantastic and the prosaic. She writes with a deceptively simple, playful, light-touch, teasing the reader with faux-folk-wisdom and unexpected, often bathetic endings.

My Life in Squares is an introduction to the work of a major European poet and one of the most original writers to emerge in recent years from the `new Europe'. A prize-wining and widely-anthologised writer, Kristin Dimitrova's work has been published in 22 countries and translated into 19 languages. Oblique, subtle and witty, her poems creep up on her subjects from behind, demonstrating that looking at something sideways is not the same as avoiding the issue.