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Author of the first book to appear legally in the Macedonian language, in a free and sovereign Macedonia, at the end of the Second World War (Poems, 1944), Aco Šopov was also the first Macedonian writer to publish a collection of satirical poetry, very daring for its time: Yus-Universum, in 1968.

Today, critics agree that his collections Verses of Sorrow and Joy (1952) and Merge with the Silence (1955), highly controversial at the time of their publication, marked a radical turning point in the evolution of Macedonian literature, imposing intimism at a time when socialist realism reigned, and that his 1963 book Nebidnina (translated into English as Not-Being) introduced the modern trend into Macedonian literature.

Šopov was also the first Macedonian author to be published in Slovenian, another Yugoslav language, in 1957; the first to be published in a non-Slavic language, Hungarian, in 1964; and the first to be published in a language of wider communication, Russian, the same year.

Aco Šopov's poems appeared in English in numerous anthologies, before being published in a voluminous bilingual collection under the title The Long Coming of the Fire, translated into English by Christina E. Kramer and Rawley Grau, and published by Deep Vellum (Dallas, USA), in 2023, to mark the centenary of his birth.

In addition, Šopov translated into Macedonian three major works by Shakespeare: Hamlet (1960), Romeo and Juliet (1964) and a selection of 60 Sonnets (1968), as well as some twenty books of Yugoslav and world classics, including Bagritsky, Corneille, Krylov, Rostand and others.

During his lifetime, he published twelve collections of poetry, as well as eight books of selected poems in Macedonian and ten in foreign languages. The number of the latter has been steadily increasing since his death in 1982. The same applies to books about him.