Why Bulgarian writer won €50,000 International Booker Prize

By Nehru Odeh

The International Booker Prize has announced Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s novel, “Time Shelter”, as the winner of its 2023 edition. The prize is worth €50,000.

The €50,000 prize which is split equally between the author and translator, is awarded annually for a novel or short story collection in any language that has been translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland.

Still, this is the first time ever that a novel written by a Bulgarian has won the prize. The book was translated by Angela Rodel.

The first time time ever that a novel written by a Bulgarian has won the award? Certainly. Anouncing the winner, Chair of judges Leïla Slimani described “Time Shelter” as “a brilliant novel full of irony and melancholy”, and added: “It is a very profound work that deals with a contemporary question and also a philosophical question: what happens to us when our memories disappear?”

Slimani said the novel “questions the way in which our memory is the cement of our identity and our intimate narrative.

“But it is also a great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future, where the past is reinvented and nostalgia is a poison,” she continued. “It offers us a perspective on the destiny of countries like Bulgaria, which have found themselves at the heart of the ideological conflict between the west and the communist world.

“It is a novel that invites reflection and vigilance as much as it moves us, because the language – sensitive and precise – manages to capture, in a Proustian vein, the extreme fragility of the past. And it mixes, in its very form, a great modernity with references to the major texts of European literature, notably through the character of Gaustine, an emanation from a world on the verge of extinction.

Slimani was joined on the judging panel by Uilleam Blacker, one of Britain’s leading literary translators from Ukrainian, Booker-shortlisted novelist Tan Twan Eng, New Yorker staff writer Parul Sehgal and Frederick Studemann, literary editor of the Financial Times.

The New York Times described “Time Shelter,” as a novel in which a wave of nostalgia sweeps Europe and entire countries consider living in past eras.

“Time Shelter” is Gospodinov’s fourth book to be translated into English. It concerns the opening of a “clinic for the past” that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, with everything from furniture, cigarettes and drinks from the era, to newspapers that cover each day of the decade. As word spreads, healthy people begin to seek refuge in the clinic to escape the horrors of modern life.

According to the Guardian, Gospodinov and Rodel were announced as winners at an event at London’s Sky Garden on Tuesday evening. The pair were up against a shortlist that included Eva Baltasar’s “Boulder”, translated by Julia Sanches from Catalan, “The Gospel According to the New World” by Maryse Condé, translated from French by her husband Richard Philcox.

Others were “Whale” by Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim, “Standing Heavy” by GauZ’, translated from French by Frank Wynne and “Still Born” by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey.

When Gospodinov’s “Time Shelter” was published in Bulgaria, it topped the book charts, and won the Strega European prize. Gospodinov is a Bulgarian novelist, poet and playwright, while Rodel is a musician and literary translator who lives and works in Bulgaria.

Patrick McGuinness in his Guardian review called Gospodinov “a writer of great warmth as well as skill” and said Rodel’s translation was done with “skill and delicacy”.

Time Shelter’s win marks the second year in a row that the award has gone to a book in a language never previously honoured by the prize. Last year’s winner, Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell, was the first novel translated from Hindi to win.