Nikolai Grozni began training to become a classical pianist at the age of five. He won his first piano award in Salerno, Italy, when he was ten, and continued winning awards and performing until his untimely dismissal from the music high school in his native Sofia. He moved to Boston to study jazz and composition at Berklee College of Music, but, having set his sights on the pursuit of the transmundane, he suddenly left for India to become a Buddhist monk and study at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamsala. Five years later he disrobed and returned to Sofia, ostensibly to focus on his writing. Since then Grozni has published five novels and one memoir, received an MFA from Brown University, and worked on his photography, all the while traveling in triangles between Bulgaria, France and the US. Farewell, Monsieur Gaston is his latest novel.        

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