Elisaveta Bagryana is one of the most outstanding representatives of contemporary Bulgarian poetry. She belongs to the generation that came on the scene during the years after World War I, but she was also a contemporary of several more poetic generations, sustaining a career that lasted for more than sixty years. Her verse is considered one of the greatest achievements in Bulgarian literature.

Elisaveta Bagryana is the pseudonym of Elisaveta Lyubomirova Belcheva, born on 16 April 1893 in Sofia to Maria and Lyubomir Belchev. The first of their seven children, she attended school in Sofia. In 1906 she finished intermediary school, and the following year she enrolled in the Girls' High School in Veliko Turnovo, where her father had been sent on service. There, at age fourteen, she first attempted to write verse. In 1907 she studied for a few months at a high school in Sliven, her father's native city, which...