Released July 31st, 2025 // 102 pages // 978-1-917617-24-6 // RRP: £12.99 / $17.99 / €15.99
Yordan Efftimov’s The Heart Is Not a Creator, translated by Jonathan Dunne, is a layered and formally restless collection that dissects emotional, political, and existential terrains with satirical precision and lyrical detachment. Moving between fragmented narrative, philosophical aphorism, and surreal image-making, the book creates a shifting poetic voice that questions belief, authorship, and the limitations of language. Bodies, borders, and histories emerge as unstable elements in a landscape where absurdity and intimacy coexist. Dunne’s translation captures the tonal elasticity of the original, rendering a text that is at once cerebral, strange, and acutely alive to contradiction.
ABOUT Jonathan Dunne & Yordan Efftimov:
Jonathan Dunne is a graduate in Classics from the University of Oxford. He has translated more than eighty books from Bulgarian, Catalan, Galician and Spanish. He directs Small Stations Press, the main publisher of Galician literature in English. He has written on the theology of language, most recently Seven Brief Lessons on Language (2023). He sees a connection between language and the environment, both of which are waiting to be interpreted. More info on his website: www.stonesofithaca.com.
Yordan Efftimov (born January 23, 1971, in Razgrad, Bulgaria) is a poet, literary historian, and assistant professor in Theory of Literature at New Bulgarian University, Sofia. He has written eight poetry books. The Heart Is Not a Creator received a double recognition – it won the Ivan Nikolov National Award for Poetry Book of the Year (2013) and the Hristo Fotev National Award for Poetry (2014). He is the author of popular science books, most recently Quarantinscapes and Other Micro-Essays (2021).
