Zlatomir Zlatanov

Zlatomir Zlatanov (1953, Slatina, Bulgaria) is a poet, writer and theorist, and is one of the mavericks of Bulgarian postmodernism. At the very cusp of the theoretic-political transition, he has already experimented with short stories and poetry, as in the poetic book Palinodies (1989), largely considered the first openly postmodernist poetry book in Bulgaria. He pre-emptively examined the coming neoliberal transition with his novelette Exitus (1985), which he adapted for the eponymous 1989 film directed by Krassimir Kroumov (considered one of the most representative Bulgarian films concerning the perestroika). Plundering the poetic canon, especially of national poetry, he has transformed and hijacked familiar meanings from the canon into workable socio-political material, with books such as, most (in)famously, On the Island of the Coprophiles (1997). In the late 1990s and early 2000s he began to develop an increasingly theoretical lexis (beginning with Protocols for the Other, 2000) and later engaged with the thought of Lacan and Badiou, publishing novels such as Pola (2000) and Lacanian Networks (2005), and the series of essays Alain Badiou, Or, the Persistence of Illogical Worlds (2008). His latest books (all edited by Stanimir Panayotov) are No One Knows Why: Collected Plays (2021), A Book About the (Non-)Bulgarian People (2022) and Limitrophies: Verses and Poems (2023). He recently published his latest book The Sovereign Fiction.

Photo by Mario Koev