Bulgarian Writer Georgi Gospodinov and his translator Angela Rodel have won the International Booker Prize for the novel Time Shelter, which became the first book written in Bulgarian to win the Booker Prize. The prize was announced at an event in London. Each of the six authors whose works were shortlisted for the prestigious literary prize received a cheque for £50,000, which they will split with the book's English translators.
Leila Slimani, the chair of judges for the 2023 International Booker Prize, remarked,” Our winner, Time Shelter, is a brilliant novel, full of irony and melancholy. It is a profound work that deals with a very contemporary question: What happens to us when our memories disappear? Georgi Gospodinov succeeds marvellously in dealing with both individual and collective destinies and it is this complex balance between the intimate and the universal that convinced and touched us.”.
Time Shelter is Gospodinov’s fourth book to be translated into English. It concerns the opening of a "clinic for the past" that provides Alzheimer's patients with a promising treatment: Every floor meticulously recreates a certain decade, down to the furniture, drinks, and newspapers that cover every day of the decade. As word gets out, healthy people start coming to the clinic for safety from the horrors of modern life.
Speaking about the book, Georgi said “My urge to write this book came from the sense that something had gone awry in the clockworks of time. You could catch the scent of anxiety hanging in the air, you could touch it with your finger. After 2016 we seemed to be living in another world and another time. The world’s disintegration with the encroachment of populism and playing the card of the ‘great past’ in the US and in Europe provoked me."
Translator of the book Angela said “I began translating the book before I had the chance to read it, for the simple reason that it had not been finished yet! Given the success of Georgi’s previous novel, The Physics of Sorrow, numerous people, especially colleagues from his Cullman Center fellowship, but also his agent and others, were very eager to get a peek at his new work-in-progress – thus in the fall of 2019 I translated a 50-page excerpt of what would later become the opening of Time Shelter, which was finally published in Bulgarian in the infamous spring of 2020. Once the full Bulgarian final draft was ready, I dove in and translated the whole book in about six months.”
Georgi is a poet, author, and playwright from Bulgaria. Time Shelter topped the book charts when it was published in Bulgaria and was awarded the Strega European Prize. Angela is a musician and literary translator who lives and works in Bulgaria. Time Shelter's win makes it the second year in a row that the prize has been given to a book written in a language that has never before received it. The winner from the previous year, Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell, was the first book from Hindi to win.