Petros Markaris

Petros Markaris — Biography

Petros Markaris (Greek: Πέτρος Μάρκαρης), born Bedros Markarian to an Armenian father and a Greek mother, is a Greek writer, screenwriter, translator and linguist born in 1937 in Istanbul (on the island of Heybeliada). He finished secondary school in Istanbul at the Austrian St. George's High School before studying economics in Vienna and Stuttgart, and left Istanbul for Athens in 1964.

He gained international recognition for his crime-fiction series featuring the irascible Athenian police inspector Kostas Haritos, translated into more than twenty languages and a bestseller in Germany, Italy and Spain, with a devoted readership as far afield as Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia. He is also a noted translator from Turkish and German, and contributed to the screenplays of several Theo Angelopoulos films, including the Cannes Palme d'Or winner "Eternity and a Day" (1998), "Ulysses' Gaze" and "Waiting for the Clouds". Between 2008 and 2012 he served as president of Greece's National Book Centre (EKEBI), and his work has been recognized with Germany's Order of Merit, the Goethe Medal and the Prix du Polar Européen.

In Turkey, his books were published for a time by Turkuvaz Kitap and, since 2023, by Alfa Kitap; by early 2025 a short-story collection and twelve of his Kostas Haritos novels had appeared in Turkish translation. Markaris has kept close ties to Istanbul, periodically returning to meet readers at book events in the city.