Minkoff, Velina
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Velina Minkoff is a literary translator and author. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from UCLA with a track in Creative Writing – Fiction, and a Master of Arts in European Studies from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) with a track in European culture and history. She is a graduate of the École de Traduction Littéraire at the Centre National du Livre in Paris, France with a thesis in autotraduction (self-translation).
Born into a family of literary translators, she translated into Bulgarian The Love Machine by Jaqueline Susann (Colibri, 1992) while still a student at the English Language School in Sofia, followed by Jacintha by Kathleen Winsor (Bard, 1993). She is the author of a short story collection in English, Red Shorts (Colibri, 2001) and co-translator, with translation professor Patrick Maurus, of the French version of her Bulgarian debut novel, Доклад на зелената амеба за химическия молив (The Red and Blue Report of the Green Amoeba, Colibri, 2015) published in France as Le Grand Leader doit venir nous voir (The Great Leader Must Come See Us, Actes sud, 2018). Her first Bulgarian short story collection, Бразилски храст (Full-bush Brazillian, Colibri, 2018) contains her own translations of stories she originally wrote in English, and Les Shorts Rouges (The Red Shorts, Hémisphères, 2020) – her French translations of stories written in both English and Bulgarian.
She has translated several books, plays, films, poems, and short stories to and from English, Bulgarian and French. She was a participant in the Translators’ Atelier Workshop of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for four years in a row, resident translator at Open Letter Books in Rochester, NY, USA and auditrice libre at the master’s program of literary translation at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. She is a member of the Bulgarian Translators’ Union, the Association des traducteurs littéraires de France and the French Société des Gens de Lettres. Her translations have appeared in Vagabond, The Bridge Magazine, Exchanges Literary Journal, Eurolitkrant, and Drunken Boat, among others. Her self-translated debut novel The Red and Blue Report of the Green Amoeba (Доклад на зелената амеба за химическия молив, Colibri, 2015) was shortlisted in the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation contest for the publication of a contemporary Bulgarian novel into English by Open Letter Books.
Velina lives in Paris, where she freelances as a translator, editor, and writer. She is currently a doctoral candidate in translation of Bulgarian Literature at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO).