The Big Idea: Haralambi Markov

Death is a rather big part of life, so it makes sense that author Haralambi Markov kept writing about it, whether that was intentional on his part or not. In the Big Idea for his newest collection of short stories, Markov talks about his own experience with mental illness and death that contributed to this horrific yet strangely hopeful collection titled The Language of Knives. HARALAMBI MARKOV: “You want to die.” That’s the first thing a friend of mine told me after reading the first stories I’d written. We were in high school at the time. The second thing he told me is that I shouldn’t write in English before learning how to do it in Bulgarian, because that’s my mother tongue. He was a writer as well, although he wrote literary fiction and listened to Mozart. I respected him a lot at the time, which is probably why I took great offense at both statements and chose to ignore him. I continued to write in English—definitely the right decision, although there’s a whole separate essay to…