Stefan Gechev was born on 29 January 1911 in Ruse in the family of Albert Gechev – a literary critic and a teacher of Bulgarian language and literature, and Rada Gecheva – a high school teacher of French language. He studied in Ruse, in Plovdiv, and two years in Paris – in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He graduated from high school in Sofia. In 1934, he graduated with honours from Slavic Philology at Sofia University. In October of the following year, he went to Athens to study Greek and Byzantine culture. He was appointed as a foreign language scribe at the Bulgarian Legation in Greece. Between 1937 and 1941, he worked as an interpreter at the Bulgarian Legation in Athens, and from 1941 to 1946, he was appointed as a press attaché in Bratislava. In September, at the insistence of the Slovak authorities, he left Bratislava and moved to Piešťany. In May 1945, he returned to Bratislava as a representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Bulgaria. In 1947 – 1949, he worked as Second Secretary at the Bulgarian Legation in Warsaw.

In April 1949, he returned to Bulgaria and started working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but in December, he was dismissed because he was not a member of the BCP. He started working at Starshel newspaper, and from 1953 to 1956 he was an editor there. He was fired for political reasons connected with the events in Hungary. In 1957, together with Stefan Sarchadzhiev and Veselin Hanchev, he founded the Satirical Theatre in Sofia, where he was a playwright until 1958. From 1959 to 1965, he worked at Plamak magazine as an editor. He was a deputy editor-in-chief at Kontakti magazine (1966).

Stefan Gechev enriched our intellectual history with many books and publications in literary collections and periodicals, including poems, stories, novels, plays, articles.

His first poems – Autumn, Spread It Again…, Portrait – were published by him at the age of 15 in 1926/27, on the pages of the Balgarska Rech magazine. In 1938, he published the scientific study The Matter of the Slavic Physiologist.

Stefan Gechev wrote humorous stories and feuilletons under the pseudonym Ventseslav Diavatov, they were published in the literary collections We and the Others and in the Hornet collection. He also wrote several crime and adventure novels: Thieves of the Mothers of Jesus, the novel The Girl and the Traitor, the stories The Colours of Care. Under this and other pseudonyms in various collections and on the pages of Bulgarian periodicals he published poems, stories, plays.

In 1967, the Notebook collection of poems was published, for which he was strongly criticized by Venelin Kotsev in the report of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party for Literature. This collection became the reason for the long period of isolation from literary life. Since 1989, the following books have been published: Poetry. Lyrics, poems; The Cruel Philanthropist; Sentenced to Señora. Stories; Questions. Poems in Prose; Victoria and Her Sons in Two Volumes; The Murder on the “Former Prespa” Street; Discipline. Poems; Know Thyself. False Philosophical and False Biographical Novel; Unnecessary Sceptics. Essays; The Shadows of Time; Memories of Greece and My Greek Friends (1936 – 1992); Writings in 5 Volumes of Zahariy Stoyanov Publishing House.

Stefan Gechev left a serious impact with his translations from Greek, French, Czech, Slovenian, Russian, German and other languages. From Greek he translated poems by Aris Dikteos, Konstantinos Kavafis, Giorgos Seferis, Odysseas Elytis; from French – The Songs of Maldoror by Lotreamon, French Surrealist Poets, En Douceur by Jean-Marie Laclavetine, Les Rougon-Macquart and The Joy of Living by Emil Zola; from English – Alice in the Mirror World by Louis Carroll; from German – The Land of Sarmatia by Johannes Bobrovski, etc. He is the compiler and editor of the following anthologies: Ancient Poetry, New Greek Poetry Anthology, Modern Greek Poetry, Modern Cypriot Poetry, Palatine Anthology, Greek Poetry of the XIX Century, Greek Poetry of the XX Century, etc., he also participated in the translation of the poems.

Stefan Gechev was awarded the Greek Order of the Golden Cross of the Legion of Honour. He was awarded with a Certificate for Overall Translation Works by the Union of Translators in Bulgaria together with the Embassy of the Hellenic Republic, and a Gold Medal by the Hellenic Union of Translators for his overall translation work, which is a valuable contribution to the promotion of Greek literature and culture in Bulgaria. On 17 June 1998, he was awarded by the French Minister of Culture and Information with the high award Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres

Stefan Gechev is a national artist whose overall work fits into Bulgarian literature in recent decades, and the uniqueness of his translations is our national contribution to the knowledge and understanding of foreign culture and identity.