Rene Karabash, born Irena Ivanova in 1989 in the village of Aleksandrovo in Bulgaria’s Lovech province, is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, actor, and playwright. She earned a bachelor’s degree in French and English applied linguistics from the University of Veliko Tarnovo, studied literature at the Catholic University of the West in Angers, France, and completed a master’s degree in film direction at the New Bulgarian. Her pen name combines a nickname she acquired in France with a shortened form of her mother’s maiden surname. Karabash’s artistic career spans multiple disciplines. In cinema, she made her debut playing the role of Gana in Ralitza Petrova’s Godless (2016), earning Best Actress awards at the Locarno Film Festival, the Sarajevo Film Festival, and the Stockholm Film Festival, among others.

Her literary debut came in 2014 with Halbotsi i peperudi (Hips and Butterflies), a poetry collection that was nominated for Bulgaria’s Ivan Nikolov National Poetry Award and launched in London and Prague. She followed this with her debut novel Ostaynitsa (She Who Remains) in 2018, a short-prose collection titled Bratovchedkata na Zorbas (Zorbas’s Cousin) in 2020, and the epistolary fiction collection Omar’s Letters to His Future Wife in 2021. Beyond her own writing, Karabash founded the Rabbit Hole, a creative writing academy in Bulgaria that employs prominent Bulgarian authors as instructors, and she has directed theatrical adaptations of works by Marguerite Duras and Oscar Wilde.

She Who Remains was originally published in Bulgarian in 2018 by the Janet 45 publishing house. The novel earned Karabash the 2019 Elias Canetti Prize, Bulgaria’s most prestigious literary award, along with nominations for Novel of the Year from the National Fund “13 Centuries Bulgaria” and the Peroto literary award. In an interview with Balkan Insight, Karabash explained that the novel was inspired by the photography of Pepa Hristova, whose 2008-2010 photobook documented surviving sworn virgins in northern Albania, and that she spent two years researching the subject before writing (Todorov, Svetoslav. “International Booker Prize-Nominated Bulgarian Author: ‘Culture’s Our Biggest Asset.’” Balkan Insight. 20 May 2026.) As of 2026, the novel has been translated into more than 15 languages, making its Brazilian edition the first Bulgarian novel published in that country. The French translation by Marie Vrinat-Nikolov won the French PEN Club Award for Translation. A film adaptation, written by Karabash herself, is reportedly in the works.

The English-language edition was translated by Izidora Angel, a Bulgarian-born memoirist and literary translator based in Chicago. Her previous book-length translations from Bulgarian include Hristo Karastoyanov’s The Same Night Awaits Us All (2017), Nataliya Deleva’s Four Minutes (2021), and Yordanka Beleva’s Keder (2019), the last of which earned her a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. Angel’s original writing has appeared in publications including A Public Space, Astra Magazine, Best Literary Translations 2024, Chicago Reader, and The American Scholar, and she is a founding member of the Third Coast Translators Collective.

For her work on She Who Remains, Angel received both a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation. The English edition was published in January 2026. It was longlisted and then shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize, marking the second time a Bulgarian novel reached the shortlist after Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (2022) won the award in 2023. Angel is currently at work on Solomon’s Daughter, a memoir about growing up during the final years of Bulgarian communism.