Iana Boukova

Boukova manages to transfuse Balkan tradition to contemporary expressive means, ,to transform inner experience to extroversive manifestation, comfortably balancing at the border between modern and postmodern. Original in their conception and execution images and a poetic force which subdues sentimentalism, these are poems that any contemporary poet would aspire to write. Stavros Zafeiriou (poet), Entefktirio journal

Apocalypse Confidential:
“Iana Boukova as tour
guide through the gray”

By Luke Shuffield
Apocalypse-Confidential, September, 2026

One of the hallmarks of strong writing is a profoundly rooted sense of place, a deep pathos that arises from the topology of particular geographies. To fully appreciate Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow by Iana Boukova, one must feel the historical vibrations of the Balkans, a tragically fragmented and frequently reconfigured part of the world, where languages and sociocultural personalities vary, and yet remain somehow connected. I greatly admire Boukova’s delicate tour through these shadowy tales that feel like dreams, though not necessarily nightmares. Perhaps the word I’m searching for is “ghostly,” almost a Pedro P?ramo confrontation with the complicated and spiritually plagued apparitions of the still-living in settings fit for the dead. This translation from the Bulgarian, courtesy of Ekaterina Petrova and New York Review Books, speaks of places at best neglected and at worst forgotten, crying out from beyond the grave. We follow the adventures of downtrodden characters whose lives tangentially intersect across narrative borders, until the novel transforms into something else entirely, a metafictional feast that betrays the free-flowing dexterity of a writer who has nothing to prove but proves her ability anyway.

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West Camel reviews:
“Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow”

By West Camel
The European Literature Network, UK, September 25, 2026

Within not too many pages of this masterpiece from one of the leading lights of Bulgarian letters, one has a sense of greatness. It is the kind of greatness you feel when reading Garcia Marquez, Sjón, Toni Morrison, Calvino (I could go on …): that sense that the writer wields their pen with complete confidence – able to sketch a character with just a few strokes, tell their whole history in a paragraph, paint a picture of the landscape, the era and the conditions they live in in one or two pages. And on top of that explore the art of storytelling, the nature of language, the relationship between author and reader, and so much more. All while keeping the reader rapt, desperate to discover the hero’s or heroine’s fate as they feast on the language (here rendered gorgeously from the Bulgarian by Ekaterina Petrova).
Already lauded in her native Bulgaria, she should now be receiving similar acclaim in the English-speaking world. ‘Greatness’ is a word that should not be used loosely – and I don’t: Travelling in the Direction of the Shadow is truly great.

More: European Literature Network

Book Review: “Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow” — The Fine Art of Meandering

By Ellen Elias-Bursać
The Arts Fuse, Boston, September 22, 2026

Iana Boukova explores the vicissitudes of storytelling in her novel, Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow. Throughout the book, she challenges us to abandon any expectation of a neatly devised, easy-to-read plot. Instead, she encourages us to submit to the meanders, eddies, digressions, and asides in this collection of eight interlinked stories. Her translator from Bulgarian, Ekaterina Petrova, has adeptly harnessed the language of fairy tales and sagas, serving the needs of Boukova’s chant-like narrative, which evokes, in Part One, a long-past imaginary Balkan world. While the novel opens with a date—1827—the stories feel timeless, ancient, and otherworldly, even as they unpredictably twist and turn from encounter to encounter. Part Two gives us a Dutchman living in an urban setting, perhaps in the late 19th century, who is drawn to the allure of travel, if not its realities.
The stories possess a vivid physicality. Their characters grapple with life through their hands, feet, shoulders, lips, and eyelashes. Though most of their lives unfold in what we now think of as Bulgaria, travel—as the novel’s title suggests—shapes them all. Water, meanwhile—river and sea alike—laps at the narrative, sloshes through it, and finally drenches it.

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Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow

By Rosalia Ignatova, Asymptote Journal, September 14, 2026

Ranging across the myth-haunted Balkan territories of the nineteen century, Iana Boukova’s Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow follows the braided stories of eight characters, each marked by a strange and often punishing gift. The novel is organized around a shifting narrative center, questioning the idea of a self-contained life—much as Woolf’s Orlando borrows the form of biography only to show us its protagonist changing gender, social roles, and historical eras. In Boukova, it is the story that endures, passing into another body, voice, or form after a life ends.
Characters here step into one another’s stories, moving from center to margin, from body to shadow. The protagonist of one chapter will surface in another as a stranger, a travelling companion, a rumor, or a consequence left behind. Their own chapter gives that shadow a body without fully explaining the individual who casts it, and the novel never tells us whether a pattern has been created by Jan van Athen, a foreign collector of stories, or us—the readers. Instead, we explore Bukova’s passages like Jan, who, for all his love of old maps, loses his way “deep ashore in lands whose reality was so uncertain, so extreme in its oscillations, and so inconsistent in the direction of its flow that its roads forced him to walk with his legs wide apart, like a sailor.”

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12 Must Read Books of September 2026
Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow

By Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books, September 1, 2026

For fans of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges comes a delightful book about the nestled mythologies of storytelling. Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow follows eight characters in the Balkans in the nineteenth century who are all defined by quests and torturous talent—from a woman who reads the future in the faces of her lovers to a dice-player whose unfailing luck becomes a curse. Iana Buokova’s prose offers blistering beauty and a net of history that is sure to entangle readers.

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Connect the Dots

By Priya Abularach, Literary Review, Edinburgh, September 2026

Iana Boukova has assembled a strange and compelling cast, from a woman who can read the future in the wrinkles of her lovers’ faces to a scribe-in-training who abandons his monastery and becomes a bandit. But as the story of each life unfolds, Boukova’s exercises in biography become increasingly tricksy: lives overlap in complicated ways and the narration shuttles back and forth through time. In the novel’s final three chapters, Boukova reflects on her experiments, tracing the lives of a writer, a translator and a character called Remora, who represents ‘the full stop at the end of a passage’. With the translator’s role so central to these sections, it is gratifying that Boukova’s own, Ekaterina Petrova, proves so adroit.

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