Joanna Elmy

Joanna Elmy is a Bulgarian American writer and journalist. She has been named one of Bulgaria’s most prominent young literary voices. Her debut novel received the most prestigious Bulgarian prize for emerging literature in 2022 and was shortlisted for several other national awards. The book is forthcoming in over fifteen languages, including English (Faber, UK), French (Le Bruit du Monde), German (Ullstein Verlag), Dutch (De Bezige Bij), Norwegian (Cappelen Dam), Portuguese (Dom Quixote) and others.

Elmy was the recipient of the Per Aspera ad Astra scholarship for literature and became an Elizabeth Kostova Foundation fellow in the 2019 edition of the Sozopol writing seminars. She lives between the United States and her native Bulgaria. In March 2024 she was selected as European Literary Map of London inaugural Writer in Residence, an initiative supported by the UCL European Institute, UCL Arts and Humanities, and the European Writers’ Festival. In November 2024 she created and co-authored the literary multimedia installation W.A.L.L., commemorating 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Joanna’s journalistic work appears regularly in Deutsche Welle – Bulgaria and VIJ cultural magazine. She is also an author at the independent Bulgarian weekly Toest. At the moment, her journalistic work focuses primarily on covering the United States. She has a preference for the long form and a more literary, human-centered approach to journalism. Her literary criticism, interviews, and essays have also appeared in The Literary Journal, Capital Weekly and other national newspapers and magazines. In her capacity as a communications researcher, she has been a part of several international projects focusing on media and information literacy, including work as a consultant researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Center for Information, Democracy and Citizenship at the American University in Bulgaria. Her research interests include communication, identity, myths and storytelling, and culture. Her latest project, the Unraveling Reality podcast, seeks to tell the personal story of political division and ways to bridge the gap and return to a shared information reality.

She has degrees in International Relations and English literature and history from the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, and a MSc in Political Communications from the University of Amsterdam.

She is represented by Laurence Laluyaux at RCW Literary Agency.
You can also contact her here.