What's great about symbols, what a writer can do with them is provide a really vivid, interesting image, and the reader will do the rest of the work. That's always been very interesting to me. Like if I just introduce the storks, I don't have to say what they mean because the reader will do that. And if I bring in the dark history of the region, other trends come up, for example how in ancient Egypt they are associated with the souls of the dead. You can surprise yourself by introducing an image and then see how developing the story fills it with meaning that is suddenly new.

I'm interested in the way our world is defined by language, the living word. How restrained we are by the concept of language, but when you tweak it a little bit your eyes can be opened and your world is totally changed.

Helpful to me over the years was some of Ernest Hemingway's writing, for example A Farewell to Arms. You have characters who speak Italian or Spanish to each other. It's been helpful to me to study and try to emulate that in that way.

When I was writing in Bulgarian, I could hide behind beautiful prose.

The clash of religion. We've had to coexist for hundreds of years in Bulgaria, in the Balkans, and we still don't get along. It's a reason for so much tragedy.

I think that's the nature of the region, not even simply Eastern Europe but the Balkans. They are their own region. They are a peculiar place. They do share a history that we don't share with a country like Ukraine for example, and that's because of the presence of the Ottomans for hundreds of years.

I don't find English restrictive, but it brings a level of discipline to my writing that I wouldn't have in Bulgarian. My control of English, however you define it, my ability to work in English, is more limited than in Bulgarian. That means out of necessity I have to develop a style that goes for clarity of expression which I may not have done otherwise.