Wolf Hunt

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Published in 1986, three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Wolf Hunt was the first novel to portray the human cost of Communist policies on Bulgarian villagers, forced by the government to abandon their land and traditional way of life. Darkly comic and tragic, the novel centers on an ill-fated winter hunting expedition of six neighbors whose history together is long and interwoven. The ensuing story takes the reader on a voyage of shifting perspectives that places the calamitous history of twentieth-century Bulgaria into a human context of helplessness and desperation.”With powerfully pragmatic prose, Ivailo Petrov’s tragic work details the deep wounds inflicted on rural Bulgarian communities by the Soviet regime, using the stories of these six men as an intensely personal example.” – World Literature Today

“[A] complex and compelling epic… [Ivailo Petrov] shows with exceptional skill the stark impact that communism had on the villagers of Bulgaria, and this new translation does his work justice.” — Publishers Weekly

“An explosive mixture of patriarchy and communism, suppressed secrets and broken destinies in a remote Bulgarian village. Hidden traumas send six men on a final hunt – in which they themselves might turn out to be the game. A novel that grabs you by the throat and brings out the wolves in all of us.” — Georgi Gospodinov

​”A novel about memory – about witnessing and exposing the past…. All of contemporary Bulgarian prose comes out of this novel, whether it admits it or not.” — Georgi Grozdev

“Wolf Hunt is a multi-layered saga and a rich encyclopedia of mid-20th-century Bulgarian life… A novel where the Earth is still solid and the world still rings, smells, touches, reaches and catches the senses and the sense of the readers. A novel in which dangerous liaisons of discourses and illegitimate marriages of styles perform the tragicomic spectacle of belated Bulgarian modernization.” — Dimitar Kambourov, Trinity College Dublin and Sofia University Ivailo Petrov (1923-2005) was born in the small Bulgarian village of Bdintzi to a family of poor and illiterate peasants. Petrov studied law at the University of Sofia and then worked as an editor in several different publishing houses in Sofia and Varna. In the 1950s, Petrov begun his career as a writer and was to go on to published many novels and short story collections. His books, On Foreign Soil, Ground-Swell, and Before I Was Born and Afterwards, describe the transformations and dramas of rural and traditional Bulgarian life in the 20th century. Petrov has received numerous awards, among them the Union of Bulgarian Writers Award, the Yordan Yovkov Award, and the Hristo G. Danov Prize for his life contribution to Bulgarian literary culture.

Angela Rodel is a professional literary translator living and working in Sofia, Bulgaria. Her translations include Milen Ruskov’s Thrown into Nature, Zachary Karabashliev’s 18% Gray, Angel Igov’s A Short Tale of Shame, and Virginia Zaharieva’s Nine Rabbits.CA

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