"My earliest reading memory I was taught to read quite early, at five or six, probably so that I would sit quietly and not be a nuisance to the adults. And it worked. Once I'd entered a book, I didn't want to come out. I remember how Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl turned my heart upside down. I was living with my grandmother at the time, and I cried under the blanket, terrified that one day she, too, would die."
"Thomas Mayne Reid's adventure novels were favourites, especially The Headless Horseman. Jack London's Martin Eden, too. Clearly, the idea of being both a hero and a writer appealed to me. Writers were not usually heroes. I also loved a textbook on criminology, which explained how to make invisible ink, what traces criminals leave behind, and so on matters of extraordinary importance to any 10-year-old boy."
"When the first translations of his work appeared in Bulgaria, I was 21, shortly before the wall fell a crucial moment. It was as if I suddenly understood what literature is capable of, and how there are no real borders between genres. I had an exhilarating sense of freedom, but also of a shared secret. Memory, erudition, heart, science and myth all of it was there."
Reading began around age five or six as a way to stay quiet, and books became an immersive refuge. Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl provoked fear of losing a beloved grandmother. Random reading of parents' books led to favourites like Thomas Mayne Reid and Jack London's Martin Eden, and a criminology textbook fueled childhood fascination. Teenage reading was driven by a scarcity of eroticism in late socialist Bulgaria and an obsession with J.D. Salinger. Translations of Jorge Luis Borges at 21 revealed literature's genre-blurring power, combining memory, erudition, science, myth and emotion. The poems of Peyo Yavorov and Nikola Vaptsarov inspired the start of writing.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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