Mercia MacDermott (Bulgarian: Мерсия Макдермот; born 7 April 1927) is an English writer and historian. Having spent 27 years in Bulgaria, MacDermott is known for her books on Bulgarian history. She has been a foreign member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences since 1987 and was granted a honoris causa doctorate by Sofia University in 2007.
MacDermott was born in Plymouth, Devon, United Kingdom. Her father was a surgeon with the Royal Navy and her mother was a teacher. Due to her father's work in the navy, she spent some of her early years in Weihai, China, and Mercia learned Mandarin Chinese.[1] In the summer of 1947, while participating in a youth brigade in Yugoslavia with other English students, she had her first contact with Bulgarians, among which writer Pavel Matev. In the same year, MacDermott visited Bulgaria for the first time to attend a celebration at the Divotino brigade members camp near the Pernik–Voluyak railway line. In 1948, she graduated in Russian philology from Oxford University and once again visited Bulgaria to participate in the international youth brigade building the Koprinka Reservoir. As a foreign udarnik, MacDermott was invited along with other international participants to meet Georgi Dimitrov himself in the Euxinograd palace on the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast. While working at the reservoir, Mercia met her future husband Alexander MacDermott. Their daughter Alexandra MacDermott, a nuclear physics scientist, was born in 1952. Upon returning to the United Kingdom, Mercia MacDermott enrolled in a Bulgarian-language course at the University of London's School of Slavonic and East European Studies.[2][3]
Mercia MacDermott stayed in Bulgaria from 1962 to 1989 with brief interruptions. From 1963 to 1979 she was a teacher at the Sofia High School of English. After that, until 1989 MacDermott read lectures on the Bulgarian national liberation movement in the region of Macedonia at Sofia University's Faculty of History. From 1958 to 1973, MacDermott was the chairwoman of the London-based English–Bulgarian Association. An honorary citizen of Karlovo and Blagoevgrad, she is also the bearer of a number of Bulgarian state decorations.