site.btaAmerican Writer to Present Novel Dedicated to Rescue of Bulgarian Jews in Burgas

The American writer Dominic Carrillo will present on June 2 in Burgas his novel Acts of Resistance, dedicated to the rescue of Bulgarian Jews from the death camps during the Holocaust. The writer will be a guest of the International Youth Literary Festival Friendship - Meaning and Salvation, which will be held from May 31 to June 2 at the NHK Cultural Center, organizers from the Center for Jewish-Bulgarian Cooperation Aleph said.

Dominic Carrillo is one of the few foreign writers to have described in fiction the heroism of Bulgarian people who defied the Nazis and saved 50,000 of Bulgarian Jews from the extermination camps.  Acts of Resistance is aimed at a young readership. Its protagonists are two teenagers, an 18-year-old Jewish boy Misho and 17-year-old Bulgarian Peter, determined to save their Jewish neighbors at all costs, and Lily, a 19-year-old girl working for the collaborationist government and a spy who leaks information about the deportation of Jewish community leaders to prevent further atrocities.

Dominic Carrillo is a teacher and award-winning writer from San Diego, California. Dominic earned both his bachelor and master's degrees from UCLA, where he began creative writing. His stories in San Diego Reader magazine led him to publish his first novel To Be Frank Diego (2012).

Since the publication of The Improbable Rise of Paco Jones Dominic has focused on writing young adult (YA) novels with universal coming-of-age themes. The Unusual Suspects  (SDBA winner & IAN Book Award finalist) was released in 2018 and translated into Bulgarian soon after. His short story Ghetto is Not an Adjective is featured in the YA collection Living Beyond Borders (Penguin 2021). 

In Bulgaria he gains popularity with his two novels, The Unlikely Rise of Paco Jones (2016) and The Improbable Suspects (2019), which is his first novel written in Bulgarian. Dominic speaks at library events, schools and conferences. He lives and works in Sofia, Bulgaria and is working on his next YA novel.