Sofia University's "St. Kliment Ohridski" Faculty of Slavic Studies will roll out its "Literature in the Present Tense" programme in four Bulgarian schools from September 2026, the university's press office says.
The 203rd Language School "St. Methodius" in Sofia developed and tested the model last school year and leads the programme. The three other schools taking part are the "Acad. Lyudmil Stoyanov" Language School in Blagoevgrad, "Vasil Levski" School in Elin Pelin and "Prof. Dr. Asen Zlatarov" School in Godech.
During the 2025/2026 pilot year, teachers added extra modules, contemporary authors, discussions and project work to standard literature lessons. Optional modules, class projects and meetings with living writers gave students access to Bulgarian and world literature from the 20th and 21st centuries.
The classics still sit at the heart of the course, but teachers now draw links to modern authors, themes and points of view. The Sofia school will pass what it learned in year one on to its new partners: how to structure the modules, how to work with contemporary texts, teaching methods, and feedback from teachers and students.
The four schools plan to work as a partner network in the 2026/2027 school year. This will let the university adapt the Sofia school's approach to different settings, the university says. Teachers will swap models, texts and ideas. Running the programme in a capital-city school and in schools in three other towns will show how it works across different school communities.
The expansion marks the next step in the faculty's long-running push to give contemporary literature more room in secondary schools and to open up a dialogue between the classics and newer texts, Sofia University's press office says.
The programme's partners are the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency, Queen's, "Az cheta" and Storytel. Eight libraries and cultural institutions have joined: the regional libraries in Burgas, Stara Zagora, Pleven, Haskovo, Varna and Ruse, the "Dobri Voynikov – 1856" chitalishte in Shumen, and the "Yordan Yovkov" memorial house in Dobrich.
The debate over contemporary literature's place in schools began with the "Literature Is Not a Museum" campaign and continued in May 2026 with the national initiative "Literature in the Present Tense", which brought in BTA and the partner libraries and chitalishtes.
The Faculty of Slavic Studies held a round table called "Literature Is Not a Museum" on 25 March 2025. Education minister at the time Krasimir Valchev told the round table that literature curricula needed a clear plan for change. "I'm convinced we can make room for new literature without giving up the classics," he said.