Anton Donchev was born on 14 September 1930 in the town of Bourgas, situated on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. He graduated from the high school in the town of Veliko Turnovo and in law from the University of Sofia. His father was an employee who worked for the Bulgarian postal service so the family very often moved from one town to another: Turnovo, Tsarevo, Bourgas, Pomorie. The young author was short sighted, and he was ashamed to wear his glasses, he didn't put them on until he became 12. He says, "I lived in an unbelievable world, I saw practically nothing and it was the sounds of voices that made me imagine different scenes and people's faces. It was very hard for me to communicate with people. I could not see them until they were a yard from me, and I thought they were shadows of trees. All that isolated me in my world that was illuminated by my imagination. I felt insecure while I moved. It was my grandmother Srebra who took care of me for my mother suffered from tuberculosis and she could neither kiss me good night, nor tell me folktales. Srebra is the name of one of the heroines in "Time of Parting".

Anton Donchev has concentrated his artistic efforts mainly in the sphere of the historical novel in which he has been working more than thirty years now. He possesses a rich imagination, especially productive in retrospection attempting to provide answers to the major issues of the present and the past of the Bulgarian people, pinpointing the factors of survival of Bulgarians in the key periods of their historical past. Anton Donchev throws light upon the historical conditions, events and alternatives that shaped the formation of the Bulgarian nation and the Bulgarian national character. Assen and Petar's uprising (1185-87) against the Byzantine rule is the center of his novel "Awakening" (1956), in which the power and grandeur of the oppressed people are revealed convincingly and truthfully. Anton Donchev achieved still greater heights in his multi-layer, large-scale canvass, the novel "Saga of Samuel" (1961) which was an impressive trilogy, describing the fall of Bulgaria under Byzantine yoke, a powerful work of fiction analyzing the reasons and consequences of one of the first Bulgarian catastrophes. The author throws light upon notions that so far have been a taboo in the totalitarian state such as a charismatic leader, hidden aspects of the military complex and hierarchical subordination of the spiritual institution.

Then the greatest achievement of the writer was born, the epitome of Anton Donchev's development as an artist: in 1964 he published one of the greatest Bulgarian novels "Time of parting". The novel had 18 editions in Bulgaria and 25 editions abroad - in UK, USA, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Russia etc.) I'd like to quote en excerpt from Professor Guy Davenport's article, published in "The New York Times Book Review" in June 1968:

"Mr. Donche's novel is an epic in the old sense. Its grandness is not of scope and rhetoric but of moral grandeur and heroism against an enemy whose power to demoralize is more feared than his power to defeat. The narrative which is a maze of surprises, disclosures and carefully timed catastrophes, is told alternately by the Bulgarian priest Pop Aligorko (who as a child saw his father crucified by the Turks) and a French nobleman captured at the siege of Candia in Crete and converted under duress to Islam. For all his technical mastery Mr. Donchev's writing is most impressive for his moral clarity. He has Homer's sense of understanding both Bulgarian and Turk, of honoring the intrepid faith and unleashed wild energy of them both. And yet he has drawn heroes and villains as in the folk epics that underlie his heartbreaking tale."

Anton Donchev told me he wrote the novel in 36 days. He went to the village of Momchilovsti in the Rhodope Mountains in the South East of Bulgaria, and he was so impressed by the wild grandeur and beauty of the mountain that he remained speechless for several days. Another small detail that goes into the making of that magnificent novel is the fact that the writer was accepted in a small house in the village almost at midnight. An old lady took him into a small room - 2 meters long and 1.5 meters wide. There was a bed in it, a small table, on which he could put his notebook, his pen and nothing else. The old woman asked the writer if he was hungry and he said, yes, he was. Then she called out: "Elitsa! Elitsa!" A young woman, dressed all in white, came in, carrying a bowl of hot milk for Anton Donchev. He could not believe his eyes, and he said he had never tasted such a delicious thing in his life. In the morning he woke and asked the old lady where Elitsa was. "There is no Elitsa in this house," she answered. "I know no such girl in the whole village."

Then Anton Donchev started writing. He didn't eat at lunch, he ate only biscuits and milk in the morning and there was an adder, a small one that got so accustomed to his immobile shadow near the table that it crept near the writer and wasn't scared in the least by him. When the novel was completed, Anton Donchev sent it to his father and uncle to type it and he remained to look for Elitsa. He did not find her, but she became one of the leading female characters in "Time of Parting". Not a single word was corrected in the whole novel, not a single one! There was a scene of particular cruelty that Anton Donchev's father asked his son to delete and the writer did what his father asked him.

I would once again like to quote an excerpt from the article "In the Mirrors of History", published in "The New Yorker" by Antony West in January 1965. "Time of parting" is an extraordinary historical novel by a Bulgarian writer, Anton Donchev. It is full if excitement and lyrical beauty when taken at its face value but is even more stirring and valuable when read in the context of the recent events."

And this is excerpt from an article on the novel published by "Guardian" UK: "Time of Parting" is like a great crudely cured bearskin in a drawing room, reeking powerfully of martyrdom, heroism and romance. It is strong meat full of infamous cruelty and burning courage".

"Anton Donchev's novel is epic in intention. The violent and colorful subject matter is used for the discussion of large issues: is it a mark of true manliness to be able to kill your brother? How can the sons of heroic fathers prove themselves men..."This is a short passage of the article about Anton Donchev's book published in "The Times Literary Supplement".

"The author's research has been wide and thorough, his subject is a fascinating one, and those who can manage historical novels should be informed as well as impressed," is the leading paragraph of the article dedicated to "Time of parting" published in Spectator, UK.

"Anton Donchev, the Bulgarian novelist, has made a prose epic of incredible beauty. Mr. Donchev's stylistic triumph is his ability to fuse the realistic and psychologically sophisticated mode of the modern novel with the primitive and intricately plotted epic mater of the folktales and songs from which his story derives. The result is finally magnificent... a richness that can be compared to that of Tolkein or the music of Sibelius..." is the concluding paragraph of the article on Donchev's fiction published in The New York Times Literary Supplement.

"What the novel affirms, however, is the survival of man as person and, collectively, as a nation. Whitman's "creeds and schools in abeyance" is here translated into a love for the land and for man regardless of the creed-Christian or Islamic," is a quote from an article published in Bestsellers, USA.

New Orleans Statesman, USA wrote about "Time of Parting": "This work carries with it a beauty all too rare in contemporary novels. The language is so superb in translation that one can but regret not being able to read it in its original form."

And in the end an excerpt from the article published in Chicago Sun Times, USA: "Anton Donchev seems to be weaving a cold disapproval of all wars of whatever brand of holiness."

There were dozens of reviews on "Time of parting" in France, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Sweden. Millions of Bulgarians all over the world hope that Anton Donchev one day will win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Thirty years after Anton Donchev wrote "Time of Parting" he returned again to the village of Momchilovtsi in the Rhodope Mountains to look for that young woman Elitsta who gave him that delicious bowl of milk. The villagers told him that a woman of that name died a month before he came. He looked into that matter further and in the church registry he really found her name. It turned out that her grandmother had hidden Elitsa from the writer 30 years ago...

Anton Donchev wrote the novel "Saga of the Realm of Khan Asparuh, the Prince Slav and the Priest Teres"(1982-92), a trilogy dedicated to the genesis of the Bulgarian state and to the cohesion between the Slavonic tribes and the Proto-Bulgarians. The greatest strength of that novel is Khan Asparuh's character, the founder of the Bulgarian kingdom.

Anton Donchev wrote an essay collection and the writer dedicated his essays to his "teachers in manliness": George Bizet, Raul Amundsen, Nikolay Roerich etc., personalities who affirmed the spiritual power of the individual facing absurdity, senselessness, loneliness, and chaos. He was the scriptwriter of a series of feature films: "Tsar Kaloyan", "The Wolf pack", "On the Other Side of the Mirror", "Khan Asparuh", "Burn to Give Light" etc. he wrote SF stories as well which were published in his short story collection "The Man Who Searched" (1964), and he wrote a short story collection for children "World of Pictures" (1876).

Anton Donchev was included in the 4-th edition "Who's Who in the World", USA, "International Authors and Writers Who's Who" 1976, Cambridge, England; in "Men of Achievement" - 5 th edition, Cambridge England; in "Dictionary of International Biography" volume XV, England; "Who's Who in Europe"- 4-th edition, Brussels, Belgium; in "European Biographical Directory" - 1989-1990, 8-th edition.

The Bulgarians are proud they have given Anton Donchev, the writer of brilliant literary achievements to the world, and are convinced that his novel "Time of Parting" will serve as a means to oppose wars and oppression of any kind in the world in the years to come.