Lecture series ‘Georgi Markov: Firsthand accounts’ to be held in four Bulgarian cities
A lecture series entitled “Georgi Markov: Firsthand accounts” is to be held in Sofia and three other Bulgarian cities, with some of the lectures in English.
Markov was a Bulgarian writer who defected from the country in 1969 to escape Todor Zhivkov’s communist regime. He worked for the BBC World Service, Radio Free Europe, and Deutsche Welle before being murdered in London in 1979, aged 49, in a killing widely suspected to have been the work of the communist secret service.
Lectures will be held in Sofia on October 17, on Blagoevgrad on October 18, again in Sofia on October 19, with speakers Hamid Ismailov and Peter Udell. These lectures will be in English.
Ismailov is an Uzbek dissident, journalist and writer, one of the founders of the BBC “Georgi Markov” prize for radio plays. Udell is a former journalist and colleague of Georgi Markov at BBC radio and former managing editor of the BBC broadcasts about Bulgaria.
At the Bulgarian-language lecturers, the presenters will be Roumyana Ebert, a close personal friend of Markov who translates his work into German, and Dimitar Botchev, writer and journalist who was a colleague of Markov’s at Deutsche Welle.
The lectures are part of the project “Lessons from the past: what happened before ’89?”, organised by Sofia Platform under the auspices of President Rossen Plevneliev.
The schedule:
October 17, 2.30pm, Sofia University. Speakers: Hamid Ismailov and Peter Udell
October 18, 7.30pm, American University in Bulgaria, Blagoevgrad. Speakers: Hamid Ismailov and Peter Udell
October 19, 2pm, New Bulgarian University, Sofia. Speakers: Hamid Ismailov and Peter Udell
October 20, 2pm, Veliko Turnovo University Saints Kiril and Metodii. Speakers: Roumyana Ebert and Dimitar Botchev (language: Bulgarian).
October 21, 6.30pm, Plovdiv University Paisii Hilendarski, Speakers: Roumyana Ebert and Dimitar Botchev (language: Bulgarian).
For more information:
http://25freebg.com/
http://sofiaplatform.org/
