Angel Vagenshtain was born on 17 October 1922 in Plovdiv. In 1950 he completed a degree in Screenwriting in Moscow. He wrote the scripts for 50 feature, documentary and animated films. In 1950 he began work as a screenwriter for the Bulgarian Cinematography and for the DEFA Film Studio. The film Stars, based on his screenplay, was made in 1959 by the German director Konrad Wolf, and won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Some of the best known films, whose screenplays he wrote, are Goya or the Hard Way to Enlightenment (1971), Amendment to the Law for the Defence of the State (1976), Stars in Her Hair, Tears in Her Eyes (1977), Boris I (1985) and After the End of the World (1998). In the 1990s he devoted his time to writing fiction and published the three novels Isaac’s Torah, Far from Toledo and Farewell, Shanghai, receiving international literary recognition for the last two. His books have been translated in many foreign languages, including in French, English, Russian, German, Spanish, and Italian.