About

Rostislava Pankova-Karadjova, known to her friends as Ronnie, is an award-winning, bilingual writer and musician. At thirteen, when she discovered some things could only be said in writing, she began filling her diaries with stories and her poems with emotions. After graduating from the Bulgarian Music Academy with degrees in Musicology and Choir Conducting, in 1992 she moved to Swaziland, Southern Africa, and twelve years later to Auckland, New Zealand, where she lives with her family. The demands of a new language, two cultures, and life as a music teacher, choir conductor and a mother, silenced her pen for nearly twenty years.

Her blog Между два свята (Between two worlds) turned what had been a private outlet into passion, writing both in Bulgarian and English. She enrolled in online creative writing courses, earning a Diploma in Writing Fiction from the University of East Anglia & Writers Centre Norwich. In 2022, having navigated pitfalls of self-doubt and peaks of exuberant joy, Ronnie received her Master of Creative Writing degree from the University of Auckland, an achievement that has hushed many of her inner demons, the biggest being writing in her non-native tongue.

Recently, Ronnie’s flash fiction “Beyond Salt and Wings” won the Fractured and Fused Prize, run by Fractured Lit and judged by Sherrie Flick. Her work has also been shortlisted in the UK Writing Magazine, Flash500, WOW! and others, and published in MiNDFOOD, Flash Frontier, Fiction Attic Press, Ponder Review and Syncopation Literary Journal. You can find more of her writing here and on Substack.

Ronnie is a recipient of the CLNZ Creative Writing Tertiary Scholarship and the NZSA 2023 Manuscript Assessment. Her debut literary fiction In Focus and middle grade fantasy fairytale Remedy for Dinsmore are represented by High Spot Literary Currently, Ronnie is working on her autofiction novel Long Distance, set in Bulgaria, 1991.

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