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"Georgi Gospodinov's 'Time Shelter' Wins International Booker Prize for Fiction in English Translation"

The head of the judging panel, French-Moroccan novelist Lela Slimani, described "Time Shelter" as "a brilliant novel, full of irony and melancholy" during a press conference.
on May 24, 2023

The International Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes for fiction translated into English, was given to "Time Shelter," a book in which a wave of nostalgia sweeps Europe and entire nations consider living in the past.

The book's Bulgarian author, Georgi Gospodinov, and the English translation's Angela Rodel will split the award of 50,000 British pounds, or around $62,000. At a ceremony in London, they were given the honor.

The protagonist of the intricate book "Time Shelter" is a psychiatrist who founds a clinic in Switzerland to assist those suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

In order to assist patients in preserving their memories, the clinic has rooms that meticulously reproduce earlier times. The experiment is so effective that it spreads well beyond the confines of the hospital.

The head of the judging panel, French-Moroccan novelist Lela Slimani, described "Time Shelter" as "a brilliant novel, full of irony and melancholy" during a press conference. She continued, but the book was also "a great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future, where the past is reinvented and nostalgia is a poison." It included "heartbreaking" sequences that made the judges wonder "the way in which our memory is the cement of our identity," she said.

Reviewers have called attention to the political undercurrent of the book. When reading "Time Shelter," it was hard, according to Adrian Nathan West in a review for The New York Times Book Review, "not to think of the reactionary sentiments behind Brexit and MAGA and even Putin's Greater Russia irredentism."

Gospodinov, however, was "too delicate to resort to crude political satire," according to West. He is confident that the current issues will not be resolved by fleeing into the past.

The International Booker Prize is separate from the more well-known Booker Prize, which is given to a book that was first published in English and carries the same monetary reward.

Gospodinov, 55, is the award's first-ever recipient from Bulgaria. His third English-language book, "Time Shelter," defeated five other titles for the prize, including Maryse Condé's "The Gospel According to the New World," which Richard Philcox translated from French and is the story of an abandoned child in Martinique who grows up to resemble Christ.

In the news conference, Slimani said that although it took the judges three hours to decide who would win, "there was no shouting or bloody arguments."

Gospodinov, who was born in 1968 in the little city of Yambol, is among the most popular authors in his nation. Prior to writing fiction, he was a poet, and his first book, "Natural Novel," was released in 1999.

In 2015, The New Yorker published a piece by author Garth Greenwell in which he said the book "thrust him into the forefront of his generation of Bulgarian writers, the first to emerge after the country's transition to democracy."

Rodel predicted that if they won, "the country would have a collective orgasm."

Several of Gospodinov's works drew their inspiration from either outside conceptions of Eastern Europe or from Bulgarian culture and politics. His book "The Physics of Sorrow" was based on Western stereotypes about the nature of Eastern Europeans and followed a protagonist in the world's most depressing nation.

In a recent interview for the International Booker Prize, Gospodinov stated that "Time Shelter" went beyond the boundaries of his nation and was motivated by the rise of populism throughout the world. "I come from a system that sold a 'bright future' under communism," he declared. Populists are now peddling a "bright past" because the stakes have changed.

Gospodinov said, "I know through my own flesh that both checks bounce. "They have nothing to back them up."