The Sofia Echo, Bulgaria’s leading English-language newspaper highlighted that six Nobel prize winners from five countries have nominated the American-Bulgarian Ivan Suvanjieff and his wife Dawn Engle for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.

Suvanjieff and Engle established the  PeaceJam youth leadership programme, the US’s Denver Post reported.

PeaceJam trains a “new generation of young leaders committed to positive change in themselves, their communities and the world through the inspiration of Nobel Peace Laureates”, Denver Post said. The programme has worked with 500 000 young people since 1996, the year of its founding.

Engle said that they were “incredibly humbled by all of this”. “We really are just two very average flawed people,” she said.

Suvanjieff is the son of a Bulgarian emigrant, the Bulgarian daily 24 Chassa reported. He grew up in Detroit and is painter and musician and runs a literature magazine.

His father was from the village of Draganovo, between Varna and Rousse, Suvanjieff said. Before the Nazis came, the family possessed the second-largest farm in the country, he said.

Source: Sofia Echo