Vanya Petkova

In 2019, Vanya Petkova was posthumously awarded the honorary title "Unifier of Cultures" by the Bulgarian Union of Spanish-speaking Journalists.

In 2011 Vanya Petkova's name was posthumously introduced in the ninth volume of the National Encyclopedia Bulgaria, published by BAS.

A year after Petkova's passing, in November 2010, the bilingual book An Armenian Song was issued with the assistance of the Armenian Embassy in Bulgaria, becoming the first posthumous book by Petkova. The official premiere of its publication was held on December 2, 2010, at Saint Cyril and Methodius National Library in Sofia.

Petkova's last book in her lifetime would become Pirate Poems (2009) – a compilation of her most notable work with five additional newly written poems, two of which were written in English by Petkova herself, and dedicated to American actor Johnny Depp. The entire book Pirate Poems was also dedicated to Johnny Depp – Vanya Petkova's favorite actor as claimed by her family. The book was republished in 2021 by her grandson, actor Joseph Al Ahmad, in the United States.

On April 26, 2009, aged 64, Petkova died from cardiac arrest in the small Bulgarian town of Parvomay, located in the Rhodope Mountains. She would be laid to rest days later at Bulgaria's Central Sofia Cemetery.

Petkova's memorial service was held on April 29, 2009, at Central Sofia Cemetery in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, with her husband Nouri, daughter Olga-Jacqueline, grandchildren Joseph and Nasser, friends, colleagues and admirers of her poetry all present. Petkova's resting site is in the Notable Figures' quarter at Central Sofia Cemetery Park.

In 2005 Vanya Petkova was awarded with Bulgaria's Georgi Jagarov National Literary Award.

Vanya Petkova's house, located in Ezerovo (Lakeville) – a small village in the Bulgarian Rhodope Mountains region, where Petkova wrote much of her work, and where she spent the last years of her life from 1999 to 2009, has been turned into a symbolic museum celebrating her life and artistic career. In the summer of 2021, the Palestinian Embassy in Bulgaria contributed to the museum by giving a small fountain with traditional ornaments, which was placed outside the main fence. All of Petkova's memorabilia including awards, journals, private diaries, unwritten work, paintings, dresses from her performances, and personal typewriters are all displayed inside. The museum house is currently being renovated, with an expected official opening to be held in 2024 by Petkova's family, as mentioned in a 2021 op-ed by her daughter, Bulgarian journalist Olia Al-Ahmed.

Less than a decade later, in 1991, Petkova was officially featured in the second volume of the American Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers, alongside Bulgaria's Elisaveta Bagryana and Blaga Dimitrova.

Petkova has conducted over 800 stage performances all over the world, including two on board a flying passenger airplane en route from Sofia to Moscow in 1983, for which her name was submitted to the Guinness World Records, and remains the only poet in history to ever do it.

Vanya Petkova is considered to be the only Bulgarian poet with an official phonograph record titled Vanya Petkova Poems, which was released in 1982 by Bulgaria's largest distributor at the time – Balkanton. The vinyl consists of poems recited by the author herself.

Petkova worked as a cultural envoy for Bulgaria's diplomatic mission to Havana, Cuba from 1974 to 1978 where she learned Spanish and received her PhD in Latin American Culture and Literature, shortly after majoring in German at Bulgaria's State University "St. Kliment Ohridski". She also studied Arabic in Damascus, Syria, and has also worked as a diplomatic interpreter at the Bulgarian Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan. Vanya Petkova has translated the works of a number of Western and Middle Eastern writers to Bulgarian and was a member of the European Writers' Council.

Petkova majored in Slavic Philology at the National Sofia University St. "Kliment Ohridski" with a minor in German, followed by a subsequent diplomatic career as Bulgaria's cultural envoy to Cuba, where Petkova would learn Spanish and later specialize in Latin American studies at the Jose Marti Institute of Foreign Languages in Havana from 1974 to 1978.

Petkova's literary debut was in 1959, when her original poem followed by an essay were published in a local newspaper. In 1965 her first book titled Salty Winds was published, and between 1966 and 1973 she worked as editor and editor-in-chief for Bulgarian newspapers Slaveyche and Literaturen Front. She also worked as a translator at the Bulgarian Embassy in Khartoum, where she met her future husband Nouri Sadiq Oraby, PhD, a Sudanese geography teacher of Nubian descent. In 1967 they had their daughter Olga-Jacqueline, named after Jacqueline Kennedy. The same year, Petkova published her second poetry book titled Bullets in The Sand, followed by her third and most popular piece The Sinner, which was subsequently banned by the Bulgarian Communist Party's Censorship Committee because of the verse "There! Sinner – I am! I say what I think and kiss whose lips I desire, and eyes as azure as lakes, and eyes as dark as hazelnut I besplotch." Petkova was accused of "anti-communist propaganda and immoral behavior", yet the ban would be lifted a year later because of Petkova's growing popularity in the country. The book would be issued a year later without censorship, lifting Petkova's popularity in the country to the highest levels.

Vanya Petkova (Bulgarian: Ваня Петкова; 1944 – April 2009) was a Bulgarian poet, novelist, short story writer, and translator of Bulgarian, Ukrainian and Greek descent.

Born on July 10, 1944, during the immediate aftermath of the air Bombing of Sofia in World War II, to her father Peter – a son of Russian-Ukrainian immigrants, and to her mother Vassilisa – a half-Greek, half-Bulgarian tailor. Her grandfather Ivan Skander was an army general of Russian-Circassian descent who served under Tsar Nicholas II, and left Russia for Bulgaria shortly after the start of the Russian Civil War of 1917 as part of the white émigré, along with his wife – Ukrainian countess Anastasia Zhitskaya, Petkova's paternal grandmother. In the early days of Petkova's career, these facts allegedly served as the main reason for a ban imposed on her poetry by Bulgaria's Communist Party, although the official explanation was "due to erotic content found in her poems". The ban was later lifted because of Petkova's growing popularity in the country.