# Georgi Gospodinov > Georgi Gospodinov is the International Booker Prize winning author of Time Shelter. The novel is published in more than 35 languages. He became internationally known with Natural Novel and The Physics of Sorrow. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### Bio URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/bio/ Last updated: 2026-02-25T19:34:13.000Z **Georgi Gospodinov** (1968) is a Bulgarian poet, writer, and playwright. One of the foremost European writers of today, says Alberto Manguel. Gospodinov’s debut novel, Natural Novel (1999), was published in 23 languages, including English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Icelandic. *The New Yorker* described it as an "anarchic, experimental debut". According to *The Guardian*, it is "both earthy and intellectual", *Le Courrier* (Geneve) called it "a machine for stories". ![Portrait of Georgi Gospodinov](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2025/10/gospodinov.png) Georgi Gospodinov Gospodinov’s second novel, The Physics of Sorrow (2012), won several national awards for best fiction, including the National Award for Best Novel of the Year (2013). The book was the winner of the Central European Angelus Award (2019) and the Jan Michalski Prize (2016) and a finalist for four international prizes in Italy and Germany: Premio Strega Europeo, Premio Gregor von Rezzori, Brüke Berlin Preis, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt Preis. The novel was widely reviewed in Europe and the US. "Georgi’s real quest in The Physics of Sorrow is to find a way to live with sadness, to allow it to be a source of empathy and salutary hesitation…", wrote Garth Greenwell for *The New Yorker*. According to *NZZ*, *"*Georgi Gospodinov rises above the lowlands of novelistic commercialism and convention, saving not only himself, but literature as well – and with it, the entire world". The American edition of the novel was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize 2016 and the Best Translated Book Awards (BTBA). The Physics of Sorrow was published in 18 languages, including German, English, French, Italian, and Arabic. He has also published four books of short stories, the first, And Other Stories (2001), and the last, **All Our Bodies. Ultra-Short Stories** (2018). **Blind Vaysha**, a short animation (dir. Theo Ushev) based on Gospodinov’s short story**,** was an Academy Award nominee in 2017. Gospodinov has written two plays — D.J. (an abbreviation of Don Juan) and The Apocalypse Comes at 6 PM (2010) — both of which received national awards for best dramatic text of the year. His tireless experiments with different genres include the libretto for **Space Opera** (2015, Poznan, composer A. Novak), the graphic novel **The Eternal Fly** (together with the artist N. Toromanov), and the collection of essays **The Invisible Crises**. He has lived in different places where his books have taken him. In 2017/2018, he spent a year at the Cullman Center (New York Public Library) in New York. In 2019/2020, he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Wiko) in Berlin. His third novel is **Time Shelter**. Published in April 2020 amidst the quarantine and the peak of the pandemic, it topped the best-selling books charts in Bulgaria. The novel won one of the most significant European awards - the Strega European Prize (2021). In 2023, Time Shelter, translated in English by Angela Rodel, won the International Booker Prize. **Death and the Gardener** is the latest, highly personal novel by Gospodinov. ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/01/gg_-------------------------------.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/01/---------------------------------_------------_---------------------.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/01/GG-photo-Tzvetelina-Belutova.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/01/18-1.jpg) photos: Tihomira Krumova, Phelia Barouh, Cvetelina Belutova, thebookerprizes.com ### Home URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/home/ Last updated: 2026-02-06T13:03:30.000Z **Georgi Gospodinov** is the *International Booker Prize* winning author of *Time Shelter*. The novel is published in more than 35 languages. He became internationally known with *Natural Novel* and *The Physics of Sorrow*. Gospodinov’s complex narratives are engaged with the topic of memory, empathy and the present anxieties of the world. *Death and the Gardener*(2024), his new book, is widely translated and reviewed. "This crystal clear prose fills me with great admiration", says about it Olga Tokarczuk. ### Contact URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/contact/ Last updated: 2026-02-12T16:50:31.000Z [g\_gospodinov@yahoo.com](mailto: g%5Fgospodinov@yahoo.com) [ ![facebook](https://bg.georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/gg_facebook.png) ](https://www.facebook.com/georgi.gospodinov.503) [ ![instagram](https://bg.georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/gg_instagram.png) ](https://www.instagram.com/gaustin4?ref=georgigospodinov.com) [ ![twitter](https://bg.georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/gg_twitter.png) ](https://x.com/Gospodinov68?ref=georgigospodinov.com) ### Testimonials URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/testimonials/ Last updated: 2026-01-28T19:01:00.000Z #### He’s funny, experimental, anarchic and profound. Political satire is inlaid with a profound philosophy of life and death. He’s a literary magician, a traveller, an astute observer of his home country and of contemporary Europe, of everyday life and global events. ****European Literature Network**, **Rosie Goldsmith* #### This is Gospodinov at his finest. His playfulness is still there, but it is tempered by a deep vulnerability. What emerges is a sincere, deeply felt novel that creates room for the reader - not just to observe a death, but to reckon with their own memories of fathers, gardens and final days. ****Readings Monthly,** Nicole Vasilev ## Posts ### Georgi Gospodinov on a U.S. Tour URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/georgi-gospodinov-on-a-u-s-tour/ Last updated: 2026-10-13T14:45:18.000Z Georgi Gospodinov presents The Man with Many Names on a U.S. Tour. ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/10/IMG_7220.JPG) ### Death and the Gardener - Best Foreign Book According to Spanish Critics URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/death-and-the-gardener-3/ Last updated: 2026-04-13T18:41:39.000Z **Death and the Gardener** by Georgi Gospodinov has won the Spanish Critics’ Award for Best Foreign Book. The novel was honored at the 70th anniversary edition of one of Spain’s most important literary awards. It is the only prize granted to works in Spain’s four official languages by a jury composed of 21 independent literary critics. The award places the Bulgarian writer among previous laureates such as Svetlana Alexievich, Olga Tokarczuk, Annie Ernaux, Han Kang, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Mircea Cartarescu, and others. This latest major recognition for **Georgi Gospodinov** comes just a month after Death and the Gardener (translated by Maria Vutova) won the Independent Bookshops’ Award for Book of the Year in Spain. ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/04/IMG_4839.jpg) The Spanish publisher of the novel, **Impedimenta**, writes on its page: > "Today we celebrate news that fills us with joy: Georgi Gospodinov has been awarded the Critics’ Prize for 2025 for Death and the Gardener. This prize recognizes one of the most distinctive, perceptive, and indispensable writers of our time. His literature - delicate and deeply humane - explores memory, the passage of time, and the fragility of existence. In his pages, the intimate becomes universal, nostalgia takes on new forms, and everyday life reveals unexpected depth". *In the coming days, the ninth edition of the novel will be released in Spain. Since its publication less than a year ago, Death and the Gardener has remained among the bestselling books.* ### Georgi Gospodinov becomes Doctor Honoris Causa in Paris URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/georgi-gospodinov-became-doctor-honoris-causa-in-paris/ Last updated: 2026-04-04T14:09:08.000Z Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov has been awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa of the **National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations** (INALCO) in Paris. Gospodinov was honored at a special ceremony on the evening of March 30 for his contribution to European and world literature. The ceremony took place at the INALCO building in Paris. "Telling stories, writing books, and translating books are part of saving the world. Because they save the human within us. And from there, they save life itself", said Georgi Gospodinov in his speech at the ceremony. ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/04/1-1.jpg) photos: didierplowy/inalco In the formal presentation of the Bulgarian writer, **Marie Vrinat-Nikolov**, a long-time translator and professor of Bulgarian language and literature at INALCO, described Gospodinov’s contribution to world literature and the deeply human ideas behind his books. > "Your work shifts the lines within the Bulgarian literary field, becoming part of world literature thanks to its translations across all continents", said Marie Vrinat-Nikolov in her speech about Gospodinov’s creative work. "It also reminds us that literature is not only a creator of imaginary worlds but also an ethical and political act", she added. ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/04/4.jpg) The National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) is a higher education institution founded in 1669 (357 years ago). The institute offers specialization in 104 languages from Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania. This makes it a hub of multilingualism and multiculturalism across all continents. (BNR) ### Georgi Gospodinov in The Guardian: The books of my life URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/georgi-gospodinov-the-books-of-my-life/ Last updated: 2026-04-03T17:21:00.000Z ### **Georgi Gospodinov: Jorge Luis Borges gave me an exhilarating sense of freedom** The Bulgarian Booker winner on the letter he wrote to JD Salinger, the allure of Homer’s Odyssey and the magic of Thomas Mann ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/04/1775230581142blob.jpg) [***THE BOOKS OF MY LIFE***](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/feb/20/georgi-gospodinov-jorge-luis-borges-gave-me-an-exhilarating-sense-of-freedom?ref=georgigospodinov.com) *is a feature in The Guardian where leading authors discuss the books that have shaped them* **My earliest reading memory** I was taught to read quite early, at five or six, probably so that I would sit quietly and not be a nuisance to the adults. And it worked. Once I’d entered a book, I didn’t want to come out. I remember how Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl turned my heart upside down. I was living with my grandmother at the time, and I cried under the blanket, terrified that one day she, too, would die. **My favourite book growing up** I read greedily and indiscriminately, picking books at random from my parents’ library. Thomas Mayne Reid’s adventure novels were favourites, especially The Headless Horseman. Jack London’s Martin Eden, too. Clearly, the idea of being both a hero and a writer appealed to me. Writers were not usually heroes. I also loved a textbook on criminology, which explained how to make invisible ink, what traces criminals leave behind, and so on - matters of extraordinary importance to any 10-year-old boy. **The author that changed me as a teenager** All novels that contained erotic scenes - because of the acute shortage of eroticism in the late socialist Bulgaria of the 1980s. Also around that time I discovered JD Salinger. I reread his stories obsessively, without being sure I understood everything. At 17, I decided to write him a letter, trying to provoke him into breaking his silence. Of course, I never sent it. Much later, that story found its way into my memoir, The Story Smuggler. **The writer who changed my mind** Jorge Luis Borges. When the first translations of his work appeared in Bulgaria, I was 21, shortly before the wall fell - a crucial moment. It was as if I suddenly understood what literature is capable of, and how there are no real borders between genres. I had an exhilarating sense of freedom, but also of a shared secret. Memory, erudition, heart, science and myth - all of it was there. **The book that made me want to be a writer** The poems of two tragic Bulgarian poets: Peyo Yavorov and Nikola Vaptsarov. I began writing poetry in secret. Later, I was found out. **The book I reread** Homer’s Odyssey. We probably mentioned it or read parts of it at school, and perhaps that was what put me off it for so long. After turning 40, I began to truly understand it - and to reread it, seeing it differently each time. The theme of the father increasingly drew me in, the bond between father and son. Then there’s the great theme of return - not only the return home but also to the past - and memory, the question of who remembers us unconditionally and recognises us, like the dog. In my last two novels I have been in dialogue with this book again and again. **The book I discovered later in life** Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. It always stood out on my bookshelf, but for years I never reached for it. I imagined it would be very gloomy, heavy, full of endless reflection. When I read it in my late 40s it wasn’t love at first sight, but the story didn’t let me go. I love books I can converse with, even enter into Socratic arguments with. It was very important to me while I was writing Time Shelter. You think you write in solitude, but in truth you are in constant dialogue with other books and authors. **The book I am currently reading** The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk. A powerful novel that seems, like Borges’s maps, to try to contain the world - and time - at a scale of 1:1\. A book for slow winter reading. *\*photo: Cvetelina Belutova* ### Blind Vaysha URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/blind-vaysha/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T20:31:15.000Z In 2016, ***Blind Vaysha***, a short animation based on Gospodinov’s short story (director Theodore Ushev; ARTE and NFB Canada), was widely awarded on festivals in Annecy, Ottawa, Sao Paolo and was an OSCAR Academy Award nominee for 2017. The film tells the story of a girl who sees the past out of her left eye and the future from her right - and so is unable to live in the present. [Blind Vaysha in IMDB](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5559726/?ref=georgigospodinov.com) ### Death and the Gardener URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/death-and-the-gardener-2/ Last updated: 2026-04-03T10:10:44.000Z **THE NEW WORKER - By James Wood, 2025** **A Bulgarian Novelist Explores What Dies When Your Father Does** *Writing about a son’s vigil at his dying father’s bedside, Georgi Gospodinov examines what parents and their children reap and sow.* Grief may or may not have its five stages, but the stages of dying are implacable. We witnesses know the scenes and the atrocious acts that compose them: the first signs ("I’ve been having some funny pains in my lower back") followed by the medical sentence (a lung cancer has metastasized to the cerebrospinal canal), and then the wary measuring of the distance between sickbed and bathroom. There’s the child, now grown, who sits near the bed, pretending to read but in fact is keeping restless watch; the child’s awkwardness in front of the parent’s nakedness; the fentanyl patches, for the last stations of pain. And then the final night, as the child lies down beside his father and waits for the end: "I was seeing my father off and I wanted to accompany him at least to the doorway, as far as they let the living go". The father dies at 5:17 in the morning, four days before Christmas, and, here again, the journey takes its only shape: "At five o’clock his breathing slowed, with longer intervals between breaths. Inhalation, a pause lasting a second or two or three; exhalation, a long pause; inhalation again, an even longer pause, one-two-three-four, exhalation, and...No inhalation followed". **For more follow the link** [**HERE**](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/10/death-and-the-gardener-georgi-gospodinov-book-review?ref=bg.georgigospodinov.com#rid=cdf104ce-2027-400c-a8dc-426034f94c17&q=gospodinov) ### Space opera URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/space-opera/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T19:18:33.000Z **LIBRETTO** Georgi Gospodinov *Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel* **CHARACTERS** EVE: Mezzo-soprano ADAM: Bass-baritone FLY / LAIKA: Soprano and Counter-tenor PRODUCER / BEDOUIN: Bass FRUIT FLIES / PEOPLE: Mixed chorus **ACT ONE** **I PROLOGUE TO ACT ONE** *Darkness and distant stars, which can be scattered throughout the whole auditorium, not just on stage, as in a planetarium, the slow rotation of the stars. Reddish Martian glow is slowly growing larger at the very back of the stage.* *Visual play with space. The space capsule is like a skull, small, a cramped, claustrophobic space, juxtaposed against the great boundlessness of the cosmos.* \[PROJECTION\] The whole history of the cosmos has been marked by the solitude of several animals. Human cosmic solitude comes later. FRUIT FLIES In the beginning there was the fly… In the beginning, there was the common fruit fly They were the first ones sent into space *Drosophila melanogaster*, Our name is longer than we are We who work the simple miracle of turning fruit into wine Let’s be frank We are terribly fit for experiments We multiply quickly We die quickly (a short life-cycle, as they say) Oh, how fit we are for experiments! No one has been convicted for killing a fly No one has been found guilty. *The Fly is on the balcony behind the audience, like in a church during ceremony.* FLY Rest in Peace. FRUIT FLIES Hats off to the fruit flies Who were there in the beginning And who were forgotten They were the first to leave the earthly sphere. Year? – 1946. Rocket? – V2. Height? – Almost 100 km. And then came the monkeys – rhesus monkeys – macaque Albert the Second was first. Year? – 1949. Height? – 134 km. Albert the First died before getting up high enough. Albert the Second also died, but on the way back down. Albert the Third remained in space. Albert the Fourth was the lucky one, he came back alive. And then he died. Monkeys again preceded man – both in space and on earth. Albert the First, Albert the Second, Albert the Third, Albert the Fourth... FLY Rest in Peace FRUIT FLIES A whole cosmic dynasty… rest in peace. At least you have a name, albeit one and the same. As for us… is there even a single fly with a name? Let us not forget Laika the dog, The first real cosmonaut, The first one in orbit Sex? – Female. Age? – Three. Breed? – Stray mutt. Place of birth? – Some backyard in Moscow. Place of death? – Somewhere in the Cosmos. Rocket? – Sputnik. Launched the rocket? – On November 3, 1957 Kicked the bucket? – On November 3, 1957 Bzzz... Let us remember all the souls left in orbit All the souls of animals still circling Fruit flies – nameless Nameless mice Nameless earthworms Monkeys with one and the same name, Albert One, Albert Two, Albert Three, Albert Four Dogs, each with its own name, Laika, Bars, Lisichka, Belka, Strelka, Pchelka, Damka, Krasavka, Chernushka, Zvezdochka, Verterok, Ugolyok, Mushka... five of them in flight... Rest in Peace. Every rocket was a Noah’s ark. ### The Apocalypse Comes at 6 PM URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/the-apocalypse-comes-at-6-pm/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T19:13:42.000Z **The Apocalypse Comes at 6 pm** has been staged in Sofia, 2010, and won Askeer National Award for the Best Dramatic Text of the Year. The play has been selected by the European Theatre Convention (ETC) and included in their *Selection of the 120 Best Contemporary European Plays for the Stage* (2010). A radio-version of The Apocalypse Comes at 6 pm has been produced by The Bulgarian National Radio (director Lilia Abadzhieva). The play was chosen among 300 plays for the International Theatre Festival hotINK at the LARK, New York, 2011. The play had a rehearsed reading with British actors (director Susannah Tresilian) on Nottingham European Arts and Theatre Festival 2011 (NEAT 11), UK. In June 2014 the play had its US National premiere at Baltimore Single Carrot Theater, director: Genevieve De Mahy, with a good critical responce. **REVIEWS** In true Single Carrot Theatre fashion, the final show of their 7th season is emotionally evocative, confusing, dangerously inventive, loaded with conjecture, and full of wondrously stunning moments that make no sense whatsoever but make you really think. Forcing you to think both inside and outside the box, and perhaps wonder if there is a box at all; The Apocalypse Comes at 6PM is great nourishment for your brain. **Amanda Gunther, DC Metro Theater Arts, 14.06.2014** --- Gospodinov gives us a peek into a version of the apocalypse that American audiences may not be so intimately familiar with: the apocalypse of the everyday… Gospodinov isn’t interested in the gun shots themselves: he’s interested in the buildup to that moment, where characters wind up trying to bring their lives to some sort of resolution. [**John Barry, Bmore Art**](https://bmoreart.com/2014/06/the-apocalypse-comes-at-six-eastern-european-time.html?utm%5Fsource=rss&utm%5Fmedium=rss&utm%5Fcampaign=the-apocalypse-comes-at-six-eastern-european-time) --- Directed with considerable momentum and nuance by Single Carrot's incoming artistic director, Genevieve de Mahy, Apocalypse provides an absorbing experience, for the most part, even when things are at their weirdest… …The rest of the ensemble offers generally effective work in this strange exploration of what it means to face mortality amid the humdrum business of getting by, and how the waning light of dusk might conceal something a little apocalyptic prepared for any one of us. **Tim Smith, The Baltimore Sun, 17.06.2014** --- **SUMMARY** The apocalypse is not necessarily a global catastrophe, horsemen, trumpeting angels, fire and brimstone. Sometimes the end of the world is a very personal, private and everyday thing. It comes at that hour of early autumn dusk, at that minute when the light has already gone but the darkness has not yet fallen. The stories here take place in that one long minute. In the late October, a town is paralyzed under the threat of an invisible sniper killer. The people are hidden behind the window curtains staring at their TV’s and waiting for the latest news at 6pm. This is the preferable time for the killings too, the hour when everyone’s demons of fear and loneliness wake up, when long kept family secrets come to light; the hour of sudden revelations and revenges. Everyone could be both a killer and a victim. This town could be anywhere in Europe. Each of its characters, migrants and natives, stands on the verge of their own darkness. One murder, or even the rumor of it, will suffice to open the gaps in the social contract. The play explores exactly this breaking point of our common existence beyond which we tend to violate the fragile armistices with the people around. The dynamite of the unshared, the untold stories and unsaid words blows up. The structure of the play is as faceted and fluid as the relationships of its characters lost in a post-dialogic world. "I committed my first murder… when I was nine… I killed an accordion. It was a premeditated and cold-blooded killing", says the accordionist crossing the stage in the interludes. As a certain town Homer, he recounts some micro-stories from the 1980s and the 1990s, some "small personal apocalypses" always starting with the refrain "I had some friend..." The new heroes have found a new rhapsode who relates the tragic epic of the everyday life, of the invisible people from the dark side of the public moon. "They'll only notice us if they shoot us... Or if we shoot... Our stories will only be heard under threat". A father, immigrant from Eastern Europe, kidnaps his own children and goes back to the place he strived to leave years ago. His wife stays in their western home which costs them exactly 12 years and one failed marriage. Just in this situation, distanced from one another, they start really talking after years of accumulated silence. While the parents straighten out their relationship through old traumas, complexes, and Plato’s dialogues, their daughter disappears. The tragedy of a man who is always unnoticed by anyone. He leaves no memories, no traces – neither for his wife nor for the world. He could be the perfect killer. The story of a man who feels himself being watched by everything and turns into a serial killer of TV sets… An aged German woman dies in the hands of a foreigner (a Bulgarian woman) hired to take care of her. What do we know about the person who could be our only companion in the last, sublime moment. And more stories, shadows and voices from behind the windows of the town. All of them bind together, sometimes through a single phrase or hint, to sketch the silhouette of a dismembered social body - vulnerable, untold, made of loneliness and unfulfillment. What if the town uses the sniper killer as an alibi? What if the town has made him up to commit its small and big, long suppressed evening murders? Because the apocalypse is indeed a personal thing. PS To the director. I imagine the performance to be driven by the tango of the sadness, by its force and its hidden energies, not by its melancholies. Piazzola’s Libertango could suggest the rhythm. **EXCERPT from The Apocalypse Comes at 6 PM** Seven actors - four men, two women and one girl, who in various scenes play the roles of: The Accordionist/Narrator (around 40) The Watched One A married couple around 40 years old The Unnoticeable One The two friends talking about a woman ( from Six Degrees of Separation) The two old people (a man and a woman) The two friends talking about weapons (from A Very Good Average) The Story Collector and his assaulter (a young man around 20) An Old Man Waiting for a Sign An elderly lady and the woman hired to take care of her The Sandman Tina, the disappeared daughter (around 12) Some actors play more than one role - various doublings (or triplings) are optional. The director is free to intensify the hinted relations between the characters. (For example the woman taking care of the elderly lady is played by the actress from the married couple.) *Dusk, the last glimmer of sunset, or rather an orange-purple stripe that cuts across the horizon (at the back of the stage). As if time were standing still in that minute when the light has already gone but darkness has not yet fallen. The stories here take place in that one long minute. The years may pass by more quickly, changing from one into another, yet the minute remains.* **PROLOGUE** **Shadows of Voices** *Dark. Voices from various points of the scene.* ...I've gone through a couple of lives... But I didn't live out a single one to the end... ... They'll only notice us if they shoot us... Or if we shoot... Our stories will only be heard under threat... ...I committed my first murder when I was nine... it was just huhhh… huhhhh... ...The whole problem is that we measure it in years. 70 or 80... in the best case scenario... But it's a bit insulting... a bit insulting. It should be measured in hours and minutes... ...Loneliness and hesitation – that's what we're made of. (S*ilence.*) God gave me some of his own depression and aggression... ...I'm so tired. I hope there's not another life after this... ...Who would perform a play without an audience? *(Silence.*) But I've got to live out this life without a public... ...C'mon, use your brain... There's got to be a story, we're killing a person, after all....I haven't hugged anyone in years... or been hugged... I go get massages... ...Once upon a time TV channels went off the air. How could I have forgotten? That sad sound and those white snowflakes after the national anthem... ssssssssssssssssss… ...It's already totally dark. I must admit that nights are objectively frightening. I like that word, "objectively." ...I don't leave memories. I don't leave traces. ...And anything that looks at me for more than three seconds, be it man, beast or saltshaker… for more than three seconds… can kiss its eyes goodbye. ...huhhhhhhhh....huhhhhhh.... ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/uploads/apoc%20PaulDIemSeamusMiller-759x500.jpg?1603439480711) ### Future Cancelled URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/future-cancelled/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T19:09:19.000Z I imagined clearly a big black airport display, an oldfashionedone on which the letters used to flip mechanically while forming the destination name and the flight status. There was a peculiar chaos in the flipping letters, then the name would finally shape. There was also a specific noise that we still remember. So the idea was to put this kind of display in a gallery beginning with normally written cities and destinations in a normal world: Madrid, Beijing, Moscow, Paris, Rome…,and flights arriving on time or with some delay. After that the names flip with that specific noise and in the left column we read only ‘Future’ while in the right column only ‘Cancelled’ and one time ‘Delayed’. (G. Gospodinov) ### The Slape Factory URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/the-slape-factory/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T19:11:26.000Z **The Slap Factory: a video installation by Georgi Gospodinov** In **The Slap Factory** Georgi Gospodinov has turned to images and situations from old Bulgarian films in an effort to stir up thinking and memories of violence against children. Ear-pulling, slapping and humiliation are still a traditional form of home upbringing. A 2012 public opinion survey revealed that some 70% of Bulgarians approve of the use of the so-called "minimal violence" as a disciplinary method. With this project Gospodinov is stepping forward in a role that’s at once novel and unexpected, and he is a surprise. But it also is a radical follow-up of his work with childhood and Socialism that we are familiar with from his novel Physics of Sorrow and the projects I Lived Socialism and Socialism, an Inventory. Stemming from them, the current installation is a tribute to Bulgarian cinema of the 1960s and ’70s, which, sharply and sensitively, has kept episodes of "minimal violence" over children, some of which have become indelible in the memories of Bulgarian cinemagoers. On another level, Mr Gospodinov’s new project has a social dimension; it is open towards the present, stirring up a sincere discussion about violence against children, and among children. The cause for this is that the slap factories are still fully operational and the erstwhile children are grownups today. Is it that that by growing up we cross over to the other side of slapping? Technical production is by Kalin Serapionov; sound is by Dossiu Amudzhev. ### Death and the Gardener URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/death-and-the-gardener/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T17:01:53.000Z The International Booker Prize-winning author of Time Shelter returns with another enthralling novel about memory, death and imagination, as a son keeps his dying father company, looking back on the years that shaped them. ***My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.*** A man sits by his father's bedside and watches him die. Watches as his past begins to crack, leaving him buried in all its afternoons. The quietly collapsing afternoons of childhood. **MEDIA REVIEWS** The simplicity and depth of this crystal clear prose fill me with great admiration. **Olga Tokarczuk** Moving, raw and elegant. A book that will grow in you for years to come. **Katherine May** Gospodinov gives a lucid account of his father's last days and his own lasting grief, enlivened with memories and anecdotes from decades past...A moving exploration of "the botany of sorrow". **David Damrosch** Tender, funny, unforgettable. A book so full of love for its place and people. One for all of us who've lost the elder who tended the land and stories we grew up on. **Tanya Shadrick** Georgi Gospodinov is one of the most interesting and innovative writers of this century. **Camilla Grudova** Gospodinov is a writer of great warmth as well as skill...He can draw out fully dimensional characters from the broken details of their fractured memories. **Guardian** Gospodinov's books stand somewhere between metafiction, autofiction, essay and thought experiment. **Chris Power, London Review of Books** A wonderful elegy for his father, on par with the one Mallarmé dedicated to his son. **Mercedes Monmany, ABC Cultural, Spain** A profound and surprising reflection on the death of his father. **Andrés Seoane, La Lectura, Spain** One of the most beautiful books ever published about the death of a loved one. **Paula Corroto, El Confidencial, Spain** A lesson about death conveyed with the striking simplicity of the heart's guidance. **Ricardo Menéndez Salmón, La Nueva España, Spain** Georgi Gospodinov, the magnificent Bulgarian writer, has long managed to write great stories contemplating the world from a micro-perspective...Now through a garden, which is a kind of biography of the father. **Volker Weidermann, Zeit Online, Germany** With his poetic verve and melancholic irony, Georgi Gospodinov is one of the most original voices in European literature...Death and the Gardener, is a memoir, confession and snapshot in one - and his most personal novel to date **Sandra Kegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany** ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Sweden-1.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Greece.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/France-1.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Denmark.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Albania-1.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Poland-1.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Spain-1.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Macedonia.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/USA.jpg) ### "The Gardener and Death" - the new book by Georgi Gospodinov URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/the-gardener-and-death-the-new-book-by-georgi-gospodinov/ Last updated: 2025-10-06T22:24:23.000Z **The Gardener and Death** is the new book by Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, which will be on sale in book stores on August 27, Janet 45 publishing house said here on Friday. This is the author's first book after **Time Shelter**, which is the first Bulgarian-language novel to both be nominated for and win the International **Booker Prize** in 2023\. The book's press launch will be on September 1 during the Apollonia Arts Festival in Sozopol (on the Black Sea) and will be attended by the author and actor Vladimir Penev, the publishers said. The book tells both a merciful and a merciless story of a father, a son and a last dawn, Janet 45 said. According to Georgi Gospodinov, the book is a story about departing fathers in a departing world. "About these tragic smokers, often absent, clinging to the cigarette, floating in other waters and clouds. For my father, who carried tons of the past on his shoulders and never stopped telling it. This is not a book about death, but a book about a life that is fading," the author points out. Georgi Gospodinov is the author of books of poetry and prose, including Lapidarium, The Cherry Three of a Nation, Letters to Gaustin, And Other Stories, published in French in 2003, Selected Stories, The Invisible Crises, The Inventory Book of Socialism, among others. Georgi Gospodinov's first novel, Natural Novel, was published in 1999\. The same year the novel received the special prize at the second National Competition "Razvitie" for a contemporary Bulgarian novel. Over the years, Natural Novel has been reprinted many times and translated into more than 20 languages, including French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Czech, etc.The book has had its theatrical version staged by the Sfumato Theatre. His second novel The Physics of Sorrow was presented at the Apollonia Arts Festival on 3 September 2011\. Time Shelter is the author's third novel, published in 2020\. In 2021, it was selected as the Bulgarian novel of the year in the National Endowment Fund's 13 Centuries of Bulgaria competition. **The Gardener and Death** is Gospodinov's fourth novel. (BTA) ### Time Shelter URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/time-shelter-2/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:25:22.000Z **THE NEW YORK TIMES: What if We Could Relive Our Golden Ages?** One of the more promising treatments for dementia has been "reminiscence therapy", which employs artifacts and photos to improve mood and awareness. Some have even built "dementia villages", which recreate settings from patients’ younger days: movie theaters, diners, bus stops. While proponents claim such environments bolster patients’ humanity, others have criticized them as "Truman Show" - style stagecraft. Underlying these more immersive interventions, of course, is some degree of deception, and not all the memories wrested free are happy ones. The morality of artificially returning people to the past, and the broader question of whether this truly brings solace - whether indulgence in nostalgia is curative or pernicious — is the central question of Georgi Gospodinov’s newly translated novel, Time Shelter. [**Here is the review**](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/10/books/review/georgi-gospodinov-time-shelter.html?searchResultPosition=1&ref=georgigospodinov.com) --- **THE TIMES: Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov review - a warning to Europe and Putin** *What if we could escape from our troubling times into a ‘clinic for the past’? Simon Ings finds out in this novel by Bulgaria’s Orwell* [**Here is the review**](https://www.thetimes.com/culture/books/article/time-shelter-by-georgi-gospodinov-review-a-warning-to-europe-and-putin-g2ftv05d7?ref=georgigospodinov.com) --- **THE GUARDIAN: Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov review – the dangers of dwelling in the past** From communism to the Brexit referendum and conflict in Europe, this funny yet frightening Bulgarian novel explores the weaponisation of nostalgia This novel could have been a clever, high-concept intellectual game with little by way of emotional investment, but **Gospodinov** is a writer of great warmth as well as skill. [**Here is the review**](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/20/time-shelter-by-georgi-gospodinov-review-the-dangers-of-dwelling-in-the-past?ref=georgigospodinov.com) ### Time Shelter URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/time-shelter/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T16:59:10.000Z **The novel Time Shelter is the 2023 winner of the International Booker Prize** **Gaustine** is a peculiar and peripatetic personage, who roams across time. The narrator meets him for the first time in the early 1990s. At that time, Gaustine is an antiquarian who has chosen to live in the 1930s – day by day he reads the corresponding issue of a newspaper from the year he is in, cut off from contemporary life around him. Finally, on the eve of World War II, September 1st of 1939 (according to his own chronology), he sends a letter to the narrator, saying that the situation has become unbearable, war is inevitable, the Nazis are running amuck, and he has no choice but to take a ship to America. The narrator finds him later: Gaustine has opened his first independent "clinic for the past" in Zurich. This is part of a new and ever more popular therapy for people suffering from Alzheimer’s. Each floor of the clinic reproduces a decade in detail: the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s… in synch with the patients’ fading internal time. The victims lose their sense of the future and the present, but nature has been merciful - in the end allows them to play just a bit longer in their childhood bedrooms. Gaustine’s rooms do just that – they unlock memories by recreating the world of yesterday. They create a time that is synchronous with the internal time inhabited by those suffering from memory loss. This is a novel/investigation into how to live with a critical deficit of future, which weaves together irony, nostalgia, and satire, switching between various narrative levels. A novel about the discreet monster of the past that waits for us tomorrow. **Here are some excerpts of the first reactions to the novel by critics and fellow writers:** Gospodinov is one of the leading writers in Europe; every book is an event. I can't wait to read this one. **Garth Greenwell** A great European novel. Not just because Europe is a main character in it... **Prof. Amelia Licheva, Vypreki** Here some of the chapters remind us of Goya’s Caprichos, of that sombre, satyrical engraving cut, of the sleep of reason that produces monsters… **Nadezhda Radulova, Booklover** A novel by Georgi Gospodinov is a rare event but always with an effect that lasts for years bringing new waves of readers in different countries… Gospodinov covers all topics that he has delved into before but now with more gloom and humor at the same time, with a deeper insight into the transition from youth to old age and into our contestable concepts of normality. **Svetoslav Todorov, Capital** This novel has to be read and reread. It is both an absorbing and painful farewell to love of the past – a farewell by an author who has dedicated a lot to this love. In Time Shelter, from the waters of the past, emerges the most skillful diver of our contemporary literature. **Ivan Landzhev, Slaveykov Square** In Time Shelter, Gospodinov maps the continent of the past… The months after the book was finished ("in the leap February 2020") turned large parts of this fiction into brutal ongoing reality. **Prof. Georgi Kapriev, Portal Kultura** ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/France.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Italy.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Sweden.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Spain.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Portugal.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Norway.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Poland.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Ukraine.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Albania.jpg) ### The Physics of Sorrow URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/the-physics-of-sorrow/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T17:01:05.000Z *I are*. A boy speaks from the Minotaur’s labyrinth, from a basement at the end of World War II, from a rented ground-floor room in the 1970-1980s, and an old bomb shelter tomorrow. A novel about empathy and its disappearance, about the autumn of the world, the minotaurs locked inside us, the sublime which could be anywhere, about the elementary particles of sorrow and the eternal time of childhood awaiting us. A novel of forking paths and side corridors mixing past and present, myth and document, physics and mythology for the sake of the one who shall come – a post-apocalyptic reader, god or snail. **The Physics of Sorrow** is a bestselling and widely awarded book in Bulgaria. It is published in the USA (Open Letter Books, 2015), Austria (Droschl Verlag, 2014), Italy (Voland Edizioni, 2013), France (Intervalles, 2015), the Netherlands (Ambo-Anthos, 2015), Denmark (Jensen & Dalgaard, 2017), Spain (Fulgencio Pimentel, 2018), etc. It was shortlisted for 7 international literary prizes. **The Physics of Sorrow was shortlisted for:** 2016 Jan Michalski Prize (winner) 2016 Best Translated Book Award 2016 2016 PEN American Translation Price 2014 Premio Strega Europeo, Roma 2014 Premio Gregor von Rezzori, Florence 2014 Internationaler Literaturpreis, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlín 2014 Brucke Berlin Preis **Awards in Bulgaria** 2013 National literary award for Bulgarian Novel of the Year 2012 National award Hristo G. Danov for Best Fiction 2012 The City of Sofia Award for Literature 2012 Readers’ Prize "Flower of Helicon" for bestselling book **About *The Physics of Sorrow*** As Gospodinov conceives it, the Bulgarian word *tuga* (which his translator, Angela Rodel, renders as "sorrow") is, like Pamuk’s *hüzün* or Nabokov’s *toska,* a word for which there’s no real equivalent in English. …Gospodinov’s model is Borges, whose delight in mischievous games and extravagant fantasy he shares; for all Gospodinov’s obsession with sorrow, he is a trickster at heart, and often very funny. …Georgi’s real quest in The Physics of Sorrow is to find a way to live with sadness, to allow it to be a source of empathy and salutary hesitation—the antidote to aggressive politics and "market exhortations" - аnd not a cause of "savage fear". [**The New Yorker, April 2015**](https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-bulgarian-sadness-of-georgi-gospodinov?ref=en.georgigospodinov.com) Gospodinov is one of the foremost European writers of today. There are very few novels that appear to a seasoned reader as utterly original: Fisica della malinconia is one of these rare books. **Alberto Manguel** This book is madness. It is extraordinary and restless, reflective, terribly funny, jarring, as philosophical as it is poetic, microscopic and grandiose. In short: fantastic. **Berliner Zeitung, 2014** Both an intellectual game and a very human story, The Physics of Sorrow captivates. **The Harvard Crimson, 2015** A Devilish book… You must immediately read Physique de la mélancolie. [**Jean-Luc Nancy, philosopher, Liberation, 2015**](https://www.liberation.fr/livres/2015/04/15/entrain-bulgare%5F1241907/?ref=georgigospodinov.com) It's the kind of enabling device that might easily have made *The Physics of Sorrow* a magical-realist-like family saga with dinky narratological bells and whistles attached. It could have been cute; it might certainly have sold more. But Gospodinov is playing for higher stakes than the opportunity to be the Bulgarian Jonathan Safran Foer. He's interested in the idea of a radical, trans-human empathy not for what it allows him to do in terms of storytelling, but in the way that it makes the entire world a potentially boundless repository of lived experience, a universal archive of the senses, of emotions, and of narrative. Narrative, in particular, is something for which he has a destructive appetite. He moves through his own book buying, begging, and stealing stories, spinning them out of chance encounters and tangential suggestions, filching them from the memories of those who've lived them. He's a figure of the writer as kleptomaniac, cat-burglar, and spy, constantly ravening for new materials and always unfulfilled: a Minotaur in a labyrinth of his own construction, possessed by a monstrous and lonely hunger. [**Pete Mitchell, Asymptote**](https://www.asymptotejournal.com/criticism/georgi-gospodinov-the-physics-of-sorrow/?ref=georgigospodinov.com) Isn’t it said of Gabriel Garcia Marquez that with One Hundred Years of Solitude he first put Latin America on the map of world literature? Likewise, Gospodinov not only kisses realism goodbye, he also puts an experimentally playful, wittily absurd, postmodernly contradictory, self-reflexively ironic style of storytelling on the agenda. Meandering headlong, the path rises up to steep heights and descends to unfathomable depths…With The Physics of Sorrow Gospodinov launches… himself into the premier league of European authors… (Georgi Gospodinov)... rises above the lowlands of novelistic commercialism and convention, saving not only himself, but literature as well – and with it, the entire world. **Andreas Breitenstein, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2014** He has pulled the Bulgarian fiction out of its communist sleep. **Le Mond, 2015** A discovery from an unknown country… Empathy for the Minotaur: the Bulgarian Georgi Gospodinov has written a captivating novel. **Sandra Kegel, Frankfurter Algemaine Zeitung, 2014** Fiction in Translation: Ten Key Novels That Will Take You to Other Worlds **Library journal, 2015** The Physics of Sorrow is a literary particle accelerator, a huge collider in which exquisite miniatures and lists mix…This magnificent storyteller is something of a one-man-collective-intelligence. **Christopher Schmidt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2014** ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/UK.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Italy-1.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Poland-2.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Germany.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/France-2.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Spain-2.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/China-1.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Macedonia-1.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Greece-2.jpg) ### I lived socialism URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/i-lived-socialism/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T19:20:30.000Z *A collection of ordinary people’s memories of socialist times.* **Names** We are three sisters The oldest one is called Borba (Fight). The middle one is called Pobeda (Victory) The youngest one – Viara (Faith). We were born during the socialism. You can really feel. **Borba Georgieva Brymbashka**, 50 years old, doctor, Tarnava village --- **The robot- bath attendant** When I was a child I spent my vacations in Kazanlik, at my granparents’ house. We went to the city bath that was built next to the old Turkish bath. There were five or six Roma bath attendants who moldy from the dampness took care of the hygiene of the population. We gave them our tickets they stuck them on the wall behind and called us when it was our turn. After that thoroughly, until it started hurting they rubbed our backs. At the end they stuck the used ticket on a nail and called the next person. One summer in the beginning of the 70-ties I went there for vacation and I was surprised by something new in the steaming, resounding bath. The bath attendants were still sitting there next to each other in front of their basins with the not finishing tickets behind. But there was a robot - bath attendant in front of them. It was made by shining, non-corrosive metal and had two hands – in one of them you should put the peeling glove and in the other one the sponge. While in front of the bath attendants there were a queue of clients and you could hear splashes and shouts for the next number, it was empty around the robot - bath attendant. In my child imagination it seemed like an inquisition device and only the sign saying that you should put yourself the peeling glove and the sponge on its hands could tell that this is a bath device. For all the time the robot stayed in the bath (two years, I guess) I couldn’t see anyone in its "arms". I thought that there were no people brave enough to try its strong rubbing. It turned out that there were. But the robot didn’t rub as strong as the real bath attendants. And there was no effect on the pores. Long after the people stopped noticing it, the robot disappeared. I guess it was some kind of a "rationalization" born in someone’s engineer mind in the Kazanlik fabric "Hidravlika". The robot couldn’t steal the clients of the bath attendants. With its nice absurdity and quiet, passive death it seemed like the last sign of that will for life modernization that 20 years ago, in the 50-ties, would form in front of itself all the people going to a bath together with the bath attendants. **Borislav Skochev** ### Natural Novel URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/natural-novel/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T17:11:05.000Z The most translated Bulgarian novel after 1989 **Natural Novel** appeared in 22 languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and, most recently, Icelandic. The book is widely reviewed across Europe and the US. A man’s life suddenly breaks down, his wife is pregnant but he is not "the author of her pregnancy". While he is slowly descending into homelessness, the story of his failure constantly slips away and merges into a natural history of the lavatory, the flies, the bees. His effort to create a novel of beginnings mysteriously coincides with the destinies of two other characters: an editor of the same name, Georgi Gospodinov, and a mad gardener (natural scientist) who is trying to restore the lost harmony between words and things. A novel of ideas following Linnaeus, Darwin, but also Michel Foucault, set in the turbulent Eastern Europe of the 90’s. ***About Natural Novel:*** …a quirky, compulsively readable book that deftly hints at the emptiness and sadness at its core **The New York Times** …anarchic, experimental début **The New Yorker** …humorous, melancholy and highly idiosyncratic work **The Times** …both earthy and intellectual **The Guardian** Small and elegant masterpiece **Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung** Humorist of the desperation **Neue Zuercher Zeitung** Georgi Gospodinov wants to blow your mind - or maybe just provide the ultimate bathroom reader **The Village Voice** …a quick and enjoyable - and surprisingly affecting - work **Complete Review** A machine for stories… **Le Courrier, Geneva** funny and erudite, arrogant and refined, but brilliant in every respect and innovative in its form **Livres-Hebdo, Paris** ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/7.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/11.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/2.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/8.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/10.jpeg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/5.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/6.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/13.jpg) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/3.jpeg) ### Selected Stories URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/selected-stories/ Last updated: 2026-02-10T17:59:10.000Z This book contains 39 stories or tales selected by the author himself. Stories with a premonition of a miracle, as Gaustin says. In them, we move imperceptibly from our own childhood, through love and loneliness, to the anxiety of our final days. The book is coming out in the UK (W&N) and the US (Liveright) under the title *The Man With Many Names* in October 2026. ### Gospodinov Receives 2025 Vilenica International Literary Prize URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/gospodinov-receives-2025-vilenica-international-literary-prize/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T19:56:48.000Z **The Vilenica International Literary Prize** was awarded to Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov at a ceremony held on September 13 in the cave of the same name in Slovenia, Janet 45 publishing house announced. > "Literature and stories have life-saving power. They have the power to preserve humanity and are a natural antidote, a counterweight to propaganda and aggressive populism. Literature is a great tamer of fears", said the Bulgarian author in his speech upon receiving the award. The chair of the jury, Slovenian poet, translator, radio host, and DJ Gregor Podlogar, also spoke about Georgi Gospodinov's work. > "Georgi Gospodinov, the 40th laureate of the Vilenica Festival, embodies its legacy in his own unique way and sets an example of how literature today can still have an impact and reach everyone", he noted. The festival gathers authors who, according to Slovene Writers’ Association President Marij Cuk, "shape global literary thought and change society with their presence and art". This year’s motto was Brave New World - New Rules for Life, with a focus on literary dialogue as a means of bridging divides. *(BTA)* ### Death and the Gardener - the new book by Georgi Gospodinov URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/the-gardener-and-death-the-new-book-by-georgi-gospodinov-2/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T19:54:21.000Z **Death and the Gardener** is the new book by Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, which will be on sale in book stores on August 27, Janet 45 publishing house said here on Friday. This is the author's first book after **Time Shelter**, which is the first Bulgarian-language novel to both be nominated for and win the **International** **Booker Prize** in 2023\. The book's press launch will be on September 1 during the Apollonia Arts Festival in Sozopol (on the Black Sea) and will be attended by the author and actor Vladimir Penev, the publishers said. The book tells both a merciful and a merciless story of a father, a son and a last dawn, Janet 45 said. According to **Georgi Gospodinov**, the book is a story about departing fathers in a departing world. > "About these tragic smokers, often absent, clinging to the cigarette, floating in other waters and clouds. For my father, who carried tons of the past on his shoulders and never stopped telling it. This is not a book about death, but a book about a life that is fading", the author points out. Georgi Gospodinov is the author of books of poetry and prose, including Lapidarium, The Cherry Tree of a Nation, Letters to Gaustin, And Other Stories, Selected Stories, The Invisible Crises, The Inventory Book of Socialism, among others. Georgi Gospodinov's first novel, Natural Novel, was published in 1999\. The same year the novel received the special prize at the second National Competition Razvitie for a contemporary Bulgarian novel. Over the years, Natural Novel has been reprinted many times and translated into more than 20 languages, including French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Czech, etc. The book has had its theatrical version staged by the Sfumato Theatre. His second novel The Physics of Sorrow was presented at the Apollonia Arts Festival on 3 September 2011\. Time Shelter is the author's third novel, published in 2020\. In 2021, it was selected as the Bulgarian novel of the year in the National Endowment Fund's 13 Centuries of Bulgaria competition. **Death and the Gardener** is Gospodinov's fourth novel. (BTA) ### Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov Wins 2023 International Booker Prize URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/time-shelter-by-georgi-gospodinov-wins-2023-international-booker-prize/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T19:49:35.000Z The novel **Time Shelter** by Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov is the 2023 winner of the **International Booker Prize**. The winner was announced by the jury chair, prize-winning French-Moroccan novelist Leila Slimani at a ceremony in London on May 23\. Gospodinov shares the prize with the novel's translator, **Angela Rodel**. Time Shelter becomes the first novel originally published in Bulgarian to win the prize. It was also the first Bulgarian book to be nominated. > "It's an honour to be here. Thank you to the Booker Foundation for supporting this book to be translated. Thank you to the jury for appreciating a novel about memory and time and the weaponisation of nostalgia. Thank you also to all the nominees - your books are wonderful. Huge thanks to my translator Angela Rodel, who built this clinic of the past in English", Gospodinov said after the award ceremony. He noted that he had won the prize on the eve of May 24 - "the day of the Cyrilic alphabet, the day of writing and language", he said. "Happy holiday, happy miracle of language", the author said, speaking this sentence in Bulgarian. ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/01/17.jpg) photos: thebookerprizes.com > "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", Slimani said about the winning novel. She called it "a great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future, where the past is reinvented, and nostalgia is a poison". "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". (BTA) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/01/15.jpg) ### Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov was Shortlisted for the Booker Prize URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/time-shelter-by-georgi-gospodinov-was-shortlisted-for-the-booker-prize/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T19:47:02.000Z The novel **Time Shelter** has been named among six novels short-listed for the 2023 **International Booker Prize**. No other Bulgarian-language book has been nominated for the prestigious literary award. Gospodinov's novel is translated by Angela Rodel. The panel of judges is chaired by the prize-winning French-Moroccan novelist Leila Slimani and also includes Uilleam Blacker, one of Britain’s leading literary translators from Ukrainian; Tan Twan Eng, the Booker-shortlisted Malaysian novelist; Parul Sehgal, staff writer and critic at the New Yorker; and Frederick Studemann, Literary Editor of the Financial Times. > The jury defined **Time Shelter** as "an inventive novel with an unexpectedly cheeky tone". The novel, according to them, raises again the old questions about "the danger of selective memory, trauma and nostalgia, which can conquer society and become cancer". ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/52909420730_8eea84e14d.jpg) photos: thebookerprizes.com **The International Booker Prize** highlights fiction from all five continents, translated into English. The winner of the 2023 Booker will be announced on May 23. ### Time Shelter is in the International Booker Prize 2023 longlisted URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/time-shelter-is-in-the-international-booker-prize-2023-longlisted/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T19:43:15.000Z **Time Shelter** of Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov is on the longlist for the 2023 **International Booker Prize**. No other Bulgarian-language book has been nominated for the International Booker Prize. Gospodinov's novel is translated by Angela Rodel. The longlist includes 13 works selected from among 134 submissions. The shortlist will be announced on April 18 during the London Book Fair and it will include six of the longlist entrants. The winner will be named at a London gala on May 23. ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/52747355560_64fb805e59.png) photos: thebookerprizes.com ### All Our Bodies URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/all-our-bodies/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T17:14:22.000Z 103 ultra-short stories gathered here are funny and absurd, melancholic and ironic at the same time. The shortest one is just a sentence, the longest is one page and a half. The Italian translation won the Ceppo Prize and was in the critical choice for best book of the week in various magazines and newspapers. **The Three Times When H.H. Was Happy** H.H. lived 90 years, more or less in peace and quiet, without any particular upheavals. During all those years he was happy exactly three times. For two of them, he never knew it. ### Georgi Gospodinov’s Natural Novel won the Athens Literature Prize URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/georgi-gospodinovs-natural-novel-won-the-athens-literature-prize/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T19:41:28.000Z **Natural Novel** by **Georgi Gospodinov** won the Athens Grand Prix for Literature, the writer said. Georgi Gospodinov’s name was announced today at a ceremony in the Greek capital. The Bulgarian writer won a competition with authors such as Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke, Julian Barnes, Manuel Villas, Bernardine Evaristo, Booker winner. Gospodinov is the first Bulgarian to be awarded the Athens Prize. Natural Novel is the debut novel by Georgi Gospodinov, published in Bulgaria in 1999\. This is the most translated Bulgarian book after the changes, published in over 20 languages ​​around the world. In Greece, the novel was published last year by Alexandra Ioannidou at Icaros Publishing House. **The Athens Prize** is the fifth international award Georgi Gospodinov has received for his books this year. ### Gospodinov's Time Shelter Tops Prestigeous Italian Ranking of Translated Books URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/georgi-gospodinovs-time-shelter-tops-prestigeous-italian-ranking-of-translated-books/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T19:34:09.000Z The novel **Time Shelter** by renowned Bulgarian author **Georgi Gospodinov** topped a prestigeous Italian ranking for translated books, reported L'Indiscreto. It won the most votes in a poll among 620 Italian critics, culture journalists, writers and translators, who were asked to name their favourite translated book published in the outgoing year. Gospodinov is the only Bulgarian in the ranking. The Top Three also includes Romania's Mircea Cartares with the novel Solenoide and Jonathan Franzen with Crossroads. ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/----------------_-------------2.jpg) Almost all of Gospodinov's books have been published in Italy and enjoy significant interest among readers and critics alike. The top ranking for Time Shelter is also a recognition for the work of Giuseppe DellТAgata, who translated the book, and the Voland publishing house. 2021 was a very good year for Gospodinov, who received several at home and abroad, including the yearly Danish literature award **Zinklar** for his Blind Vaysha and other stories, this year's **Usedom** Literature Prize and **the Novel of the Year** award of the 13 Centuries of Bulgaria Endowment Fund. The L'Indiscreto ranking is updated three times a year, in the middle of February, May and October for best Italian books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and comics, plus a special year-end vote on foreign literature. (BTA) ### "Give a Book for Christmas" Initiative Begins for 15th Consecutive Year URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/give-a-book-for-christmas-initiative-begins-for-15th-consecutive-year/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T19:30:46.000Z For the 15th year in a row, renowned Bulgarian author **Georgi Gospodinov** urges Bulgarians to choose books for Christmas gifts. Entitled **"Give a Book for Christmas"**, the initiative is not backed up by any organizations or sponsors. > "It is my little personal campaign", he said in a Facebook post. Gospodinov is an internationally recognized poet, writer, and playwright, one of the most translated Bulgarian authors after 1989\. He gained his international acclaim with the book Natural Novel, written in 1999 and translated in more than 20 languages since 2005. In 2007, Gospodinov wrote a short article for Dnevnik.bg, where he made public his Book for Christmas initiative for the very first time. Since then, thousands of Bulgarians have followed his message to gift their loved ones with a book for Christmas instead of the typical holiday presents. > "My little personal campaign is for those who are wondering how not to gift the same perfume, scarf or accessory as last year", Gospodinov wrote fifteen years ago. This year he encourages those who are little engaged with literature in their daily lives, to consider taking part in the initiative. In a Facebook comment on December 1, 2021, the writer thanked everybody who embraced his initiative saying that by giving a book, one gives history, meaning and miracles. ### Gospodinov's novel Time Shelter won the Premio Strega Europeo URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/georgi-gospodinovs-novel-time-shelter-won-the-premio-strega-europeo/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T19:27:54.000Z Bulgarian writer **Georgi Gospodinov** is the winner of the most prestigious Italian literary award **Premio Strega Europeo**. He is the first Bulgarian and the first writer from Eastern Europe to receive it. The award was presented at a ceremony in Turin on 17 October as the final highlight of the International Book Fair - one of Italy's biggest literary events. The novel **Time Shelter** won in competition with four other books by prestigious authors such as Goncourt winner Hervé Le Tellier, German writer Anne Weber - winner of the German Prize for Literature, Romanian legend Ana Blandiana. Georgi Gospodinov's book was chosen by a jury of 20 Italian writers who were Strega winners and finalists over the years. Time Shelter came out in Italy in June published by Voland and translated by Giuseppe Dell Agata, who was also honored for his translation work. ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/2_1--1-.jpg) Italy's most prestigious literary prize the Strega was founded soon after the war, in 1947\. It’s reputation was built by writers like Cesare Pavese, Alberto Moravia, Dino Buzzati, Primo Levi, who were winners over the years. Umberto Eco received the prize in 1981 for his novel The Name of the Rose. In 2014 the Strega Foundation decided to create a European edition of the prize - Premio Strega Europeo. The five nominees each year are chosen among the European writers who have been translated in Italy and have got significant recognition in their native countries. ### A novel by Gospodinov is being launched in French by Gallimard URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/georgi-gospodinovs-time-shelter-tops-prestigeous-italian-ranking-of-translated-books-2/ Last updated: 2026-02-12T19:25:41.000Z The novel **Le pays de passe** (Time Shelter) is published by one of the most prominent French publishing houses Gallimard. Marie Vrinat-Nokolov is the translator of the novel. The Bulgarian writer **Georgi Gospodinov** is in the company of Joyce, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Pasternak, llosa. ### Gospodinov with the main prize of Another Story festival URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/georgi-gospodinov-with-the-main-prize-of-another-story-festival/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T19:25:34.000Z On October 1st and 2nd, the **Literary Festival Another Story** was held for the sixth time at the Pioneer Home Karpos, Skopije. The subtitle of this regional literary forum is Small Fictions. The festival seeks to affirm experimental literary forms and meetings of literature with other media. This year's winner of the main prize of Another Story Festival is the prominent Bulgarian writer **Georgi Gospodinov**. > "A few years ago he made a picture book with his daughter, a very unusual, experimental project quickly published in our country by Ili-ili. That was another argument why he should receive the award. Otherwise he is known for his openness to play and experiment with literature, for example, he has a recent book All My Bodies with very short stories, a great book. Gospodinov also writes poetry, essays and in a way constantly plays between philosophy, literature, word games, pictures, so he is an ideal recipient of the Another Story Award. Besides, he is one of the five or six writers from the region who are the most translated in the West and I think we have made the right decision. We are proud of all the winners and we want to present the region in the best light, but not in a conventional sense - somebody who sells most books. Gospodinov is the most translated, but he is one of those writers who question the role of literature in society and that is important to us - those messages that are more than literature", said Nikola Gelevski, writer and editor-in-chief of the Templum Publishing House that is responsible for the festival. ### Cronorifugio is shortlisted for Premio Strega Europeo URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/cronorifugio-is-shortlisted-for-premio-strega-europeo/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T19:23:18.000Z **Cronorifugio** (the Italian version of Time Shelter) is shortlisted for Premio Strega Europeo. This is second nomination for Gospodinov after **The Physics of Sorrow** was shortlisted for the same prize in 2014. ### Georgi Gospodinov wins Danish Literary Award URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/bulgarian-writer-georgi-gospodinov-wins-danish-literary-award/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T19:36:46.000Z Bulgarian writer **Georgi Gospodinov** is this year's winner of the Danish literature award Zinklar for his **Blind Vaysha and other stories**. > A jury of writers and critics said that reading Gospodinov "is like traveling in a time machine offering a mind-expanding journey through the maelstrom of history and the labyrinths of the human mind". Gospodinov is an internationally recognized poet, writer and playwright, one of the most translated Bulgarian authors after 1989\. He gaining his international acclaim with the book **Natural Novel**, written in 1999 and translated in 2005. **The Zinklar Prize** takes its name from Finn Zinklar (1923-2010), a beloved Danish short story writer who bequeathed most of his fortune to the purpose of the award to promote the short story as a literary genre. It is given every two years since 2013 by the Danish Writers Association to Danish and foreign short story writers. Previous winners of the award are the British writer Julian Barnes, the American storytellers Lidia Davis and Lorrie Moore, and the German novelist Judith Hermann among others. This year the award will be presented on September 10 at a ceremony in Copenhagen followed by a discussion with the author. The Zinklar Prize comes with a 100,000 DKK package. > The jury wrote in their motives that Gospodinov's short stories "has pushed the boundaries for what a short story can be and how a story can be told". > "In terms of style, genre, and creative space, his tales and stories are characterized by an amazing scope, spanning realism and the fantastic, philosophy, crime stories, and science fiction. It is likewise amazing to experience the sudden, shrewdly surprising shifts in pace or mood that can take place from one sentence to the next. Reading Gospodinov is like bathing in honey", the motives read as quoted by Gospodinov in his Facebook page. The award is also a recognition for **Helle Dalgaard**, the Danish translator of Blind Vaysha and other stories as well as all of his novels. (*BTA)* *\*photo: Phelia Barouh* ### Time Shelter is the Novel of the Year in Bulgaria URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/time-shelter-by-georgi-gospodinov-is-the-novel-of-the-year/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T19:16:02.000Z **Time Shelter** won the Novel of the Year National Literary Award given by the Foundation "13 Centuries Bulgaria". ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/TSV_0088-scaled.jpg) photos: Cvetan Ignatovski ### The Physics of Sorrow in Modern World Literature cource URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/the-physics-of-sorrow-in-modern-world-literature-cource/ Last updated: 2026-02-12T19:25:01.000Z The aim of these course is to introduce the students the subjectively selected novels among the most important masterpieces of 20th century world literature. Pointing out the main streams and models of modern literature as well as the main models of cultural analysis of literature works is no less important. Within the framework of the discussion on the selected novel the problem of the very concept of world literature (appeared during 20th and 21st centuries), the status and the role of the translated texts as well as the relation between national (ethnic) and a cosmopolitan culture of the last decades will be focused on. In the context of analyzing every novel, several issues can appear, such as: trans-culturalism, multilingual works, individually understood comparative research, which can mean the analysis of different perspectives of similar philosophical, social, psychological, political and other problems in different literatures (Inter-personal relationships, dissolution of traditional communities, breakdown the traditional cultural and social roles, identity crisis, claims of minorities within the definite communities, modern cities). During the course the following books will be discussed: 1\. Colombia – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude; 2\. Argentina - Jorge Luis Borges – Stories; 3\. Peru – Mario Vargas Llosa – Death in the Andes; 4\. Turkey – Orhan Pamuk – Istanbul: Memories and the City; 5\. Spain – Jaume Cabré – Confessions; 6\. Great Britain – William Golding – Lord of the Flies; 7\. Russia – Aleksander Tierechow – Stone bridge; 8\. Poland– Wiesław Myśliwski – Eye of a needle; 9\. France – Patrick Modiano – Villa Triste; 10\. Italy – Umberto Eco – The name of the rose; 11\. Germany – Thomas Bernhard – Woodcutters; 12\. Croatia – Dubravka Ugrešić – Fording the Stream of Consciousness; **13\. Bulgaria – Georgi Gospodinow – The Physics of Sorrow;** 14\. USA – Joseph Heller – Catch-22; 15\. Japan – Haruki Murakami – A Wild Sheep Chase. ### Usedom Literary Award 2021 for Georgi Gospodinov URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/usedom-literary-award-2021-for-georgi-gospodinov/ Last updated: 2026-02-12T19:24:52.000Z **Watch the ceremony** ### My playlist: Georgi Gospodinov URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/my-playlist-georgi-gospodinov/ Last updated: 2026-04-03T10:11:24.000Z [Watch Georgi Gospodinov in "My playlist"!](https://bnt.bg/news/pisatelyat-georgi-gospodinov-v-moyat-pleilist-293789news.html?ref=en.georgigospodinov.com) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/uploads/GG_playlist_2.jpg?1618347212243) photo: Elena Nenkova ### Usedom Literary Award 2021 for Georgi Gospodinov URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/usedom-literary-award-2021-for-georgi-gospodinov-2/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T19:05:47.000Z **Georgi Gospodinov** will receive a new high acknowledgement for his contribution to the European literature. The writer will be awarded the **Usedom Literary Prize** in Germany. Its jury this year is presided by the Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. According to the jury statement, Georgi Gospodinov is a significant and unique voice of European literature. His work - fragmentary, full of melancholy and poignancy - draws on the best traditions of Central European prose with its irrepressible need to uncover successive layers of human experience. His way of writing focuses on language as the most perfect tool of knowledge for the ephemeral. The author confidently transcends the boundaries of accepted conventions and creates complex, complete narratives that cannot be categorized into specific genres and currents. ### Natural Novel in Top 100 for the best books from Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/natural-novel-in-top-100-for-the-best-books-from-eastern-europe-russia-and-central-asia/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T19:40:52.000Z **Natural Novel** (translated by Zornitsa Hristova, Dalkey Archive Press, 2005) was chosen in Top 100 together with writers like Bulgakov, Milan Kundera, Ivo Andric, Danilo Kis, Dostoevski, Gogol, Hrabal, Celan, Cioran, Dovlatov, Tokarczuk, Ugresic... > "We asked writers, poets, translators and academics to help us pick 100 of the best books from Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia, available in English". (The Calvert Journal). Natural Novel is the debut novel by Georgi Gospodinov, published in Bulgaria in 1999\. This is the most translated Bulgarian book after the changes, published in over 20 languages ​​around the world. ### The Physics of Sorrow with a new edition in Poland and words by Olga Tokarczuk URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/the-physics-of-sorrow-with-a-new-edition-in-poland-and-words-by-olga-tokarczuk/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T18:59:25.000Z **The Physics of Sorrow** has already become a part of the European literary canon, wrote Olga Tokarczuk, the Nobel Prize winner. Her words are on the front cover of Georgi Gospodinov’s novel. The news is that after the first print run was over, now the book comes out in Poland for a second time, in hard cover edition. > "A thrilling exploration of the myth that happens always and everywhere", Tokarczuk adds. Two years ago, the Bulgarian author won the Angelus Award, a major European literary prize given in Wroclaw. ### A miracle is a very personal thing URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/a-miracle-is-a-very-personal-thing/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T18:58:10.000Z ...That is why this holiday is beautiful. Because we celebrate the coming of a child. And when there is a child, all of us become children. And fathers and mothers. Each of us is Jesus, each of us is Joseph, each of us is Mary. This is not blasphemy; it is the meaning and the miracle of life. And a miracle is a very personal thing. [**My own Christmas miracle**](https://www.dw.com/en/bulgarian-author-georgi-gospodinov-reflects-on-his-own-christmas-miracle/a-56048068?ref=en.georgigospodinov.com) ### Gallimard has chosen Gospodinov’s Time Shelter URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/gallimard-has-chosen-gospodinovs-time-shelter/ Last updated: 2026-02-12T19:23:57.000Z The weighty publishing house **Gallimard** has bought the rights of Georgi Gospodinov’s novel **Time Shelter**. The book is expected to come out in France next year translated by Marie Vrinat-Nikolov. The novel has already been sold into 12 languages in the year of its publication. In the US Time Shelter will be published by Liveright, an imprint of Norton. ### Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel, EKF Gala 2020 URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/georgi-gospodinov-and-angela-rodel-ekf-gala-2020/ Last updated: 2026-02-12T19:23:48.000Z Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel - how to translate sorrow and first reading from **Time Shelter** in English. ### Georgi Gospodinov Interview: Literature develops empathy URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/georgi-gospodinov-interview-literature-develops-empathy/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T18:54:05.000Z Leading Bulgarian writer **Georgi Gospodinov** \- author of the widely translated masterpiece **The Physics of Sorrow**\- here talks about literature’s resilient quality and its close connection to science and empathy. > *"After all, we are made of books we have read"* **Louisiana Literature Festival, Copenhagen, Louisiana Channel 2019** ### Georgi Gospodinov wins Angelus Central European Literature Award 2019 URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/georgi-gospodinov-wins-angelus-central-european-literature-award-2019/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T18:51:08.000Z On Saturday 19 October in Wrocław, **Angelus Central European Literature Award** was presented for the 14th time, the most important distinction for writers from Central Europe whose books were published in Polish. This year, for the first time the winner is a writer coming from Bulgaria. The jury awarded **Georgi Gospodinov** for his novel **The Physics of Sorrow**, published by Wydawnictwo Literackie. He received the award from Mayor of Wrocław Jacek Sutryk. The winner was selected by the following jury: Mykola Riabchuk (chairman), Marcin Cieński, Urszula Glensk, Ryszard Krynicki, Anna Nasiłowska, Małgorzata Szpakowska and Piotr Śliwiński. Gospodinow received a cheque for 150 000 PLN and a statuette designed by Ewa Rossano. The founder of the Award is the city of Wrocław. ***Who is the winner of Angelus 2019?*** Born in 1968, **Georgi Gospodinov** is one of the most often translated Bulgarian writers, whose work was presented in, among others, The New York Times and The New Yorker. He published 7 volumes of poetry and 8 books of prose, including The Physics of Sorrow from 2012, a novel which in Bulgaria sold out in three weeks. The book was translated into Polish by Magdalena Pytlak and published in 2018 by Wydawnictwo Literackie. During a meeting with Angelus nominees, the author said that The Physics of Sorrow was written as an attempt to answer the question why Bulgaria is considered one of the saddest countries in the world. > "Gospodinov encourages us to reconsider the myth of Minotaur and see that the monster is actually the victim. In his prose, the reality of life in Bulgaria was deliberately universalized and so it is very close to a Polish reader, who can at the same time learn why live snails were being swallowed in the Balkans…", says Urszula Glensk, member of Angelus jury. "It is also a novel about empathy. A "Bulgarian" One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s the greatest literature". ### Georgi Gospodinov wins Jan Michalski Prize 2016 URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/georgi-gospodinov-wins-jan-michalski-2016/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T18:47:11.000Z The **Jan Michalski Prize for Literature** is attributed each year by the Foundation to crown a work of world literature. An original feature of the Prize is its multicultural nature. It is open to authors from the world over and is intended to contribute to their international recognition. The Prize will be awarded for works of fiction or non fiction, irrespective of the language in which it is written. The winner will receive an amount of CHF 50,000, offering the possibility of greater dedication to her or his art. To make up the Jury, the Foundation has called on exceptional writers who are multilingual, selected for their knowledge of various literary genres, but particularly for their cultural openness. **The Physics of Sorrow** stands out by it formal ingeniousness, providing a fragmented narrative made up of a multitude of stories and thoughts, echoes and leaps, of journeys in time and space but also in the Other, exploring what the human condition in a post-modern age can be, full of doubts and crises. *"I am us",* states the book’s prologue: at the heart of a choral production, the storyteller is multiple, gifted with such empathy that he has the ability to enter lives other than his own. In this way he is both a small boy and his adult self in communist and post-communist Bulgaria from 1968 to 2011, he is also his grandfather as a child in 1925 and his grandfather as a soldier in World War II, he is an animal, vegetable, cloud...he is also the Minotaur, his symbolic alter ego throughout this labyrinth novel. In the meanders of individual and collective memory, **Georgi Gospodinov** follows a quest for identity which is also that of a country and of Europe as a whole, because sorrow spreads, sorrow migrates. > *"This is what I want to write about, this sensation of sorrow, the exhaustion of sense, which, on one hand, may be a painful feeling, but which, on the other hand, can also be a luminous feeling. A sad man is a man who thinks; a sad man is a man who contemplates. I think that when a sorrow is told it becomes more luminous".* The writer therefore collects random memories, tells tales, myths and adds small personal and family stories to greater history; adds lists, images, schemas, citations and references, that play like the brilliantly orchestrated melody of an encyclopaedia. He relates the story to ward off its obliteration by time, to try to encompass a whole, to link his "self" to other "selves" and to cement empathy for shared humanity. His guiding threads, woven with humour, spirit and poetry, follow each other delightfully in a hymn to the powers of literature. > **The Physics of Sorrow**opens a fascinating story chest bringing to life meanings for one’s self and others, for today and tomorrow, *"something like an alternative energy source",* as Georgi Gospodinov hopes. **The winner of the Jan Michalski Prize 2016 Georgi Gospodinov will receive an award of CHF 50,000.00 and a work by the Bernese artist Markus Raetz that has been chosen for him: *Binocular View,* 2001, a photogravure in colour.** ### The Physics of Sorrow URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/the-new-yorker-2015/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:27:03.000Z **THE NEW YORKER, 2015** The Bulgarian Sadness of Georgi Gospodinov By Garth Greenwell In December, 2010, The Economist published an article on "the geography of happiness" which declared Bulgaria - at that time (along with Romania) the newest, and perhaps most maligned, member of the E.U. - "the saddest place in the world". Almost exactly a year later, Georgi Gospodinov, Bulgaria’s best-known writer, published his second novel **The Physics of Sorrow.** (Open Letter Books publishes an English translation this month). In interviews, Gospodinov positioned the book as, in part, a response to the Economist article and to broader clichés about the Eastern European temperament: "Ultimately my protagonist is trying to tell a story about precisely this place, the saddest place, and to cope with his own sadnesses. Or at least to put them in order and describe them". The novel was a sensation in Bulgaria: its first printing sold out in a day, and it went on to become the country’s best-selling book of 2012\. It swept the national literary prizes, and in translation was shortlisted for several major European awards, including the Premio Strega Europeo and the Brücke Berlin Preis... For more follow the link [**HERE**](https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-bulgarian-sadness-of-georgi-gospodinov?ref=georgigospodinov.com) ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/Image-6.10.25-at-21.50.jpeg) ### Blind Vaysha URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/blind-vaysha-2/ Last updated: 2026-02-14T14:02:12.000Z The short story **Blind Vaysha** is part of the book *And Other Stories* (2001). Based on this story, animator Theodore Ushev created a short animated film, which was an **Academy Award (Oscar)** nominee in 2017. ![](https://georgigospodinov.com/content/images/2026/02/vaysha-ot-knigata.jpg) drawings: Theodore Ushev ### The Story Smuggler URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/the-story-smuggler/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:04:45.000Z Some smuggle cigarettes or alcohol, others weapons, but for renowned Bulgarian novelist Georgi Gospodinov, the most dangerous contraband is carried by writers, who surreptitiously move stories across borders. In **The Story Smuggler**, Gospodinov explores how smugglers, writers, and translators are all involved in transporting whatever may be desired, valued, missing, repressed, or forbidden. There’s a melancholic tone here, as Gospodinov’s exploration focuses on his childhood in Communist Bulgaria and on the fantasies of other lives and places that this childhood engendered. Accompanying the text are drawings by award-winning Bulgarian animator and graphic artist Theodore Ushev, adding a further layer to its exposition of border-crossing. ### Where We Are Not URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/where-we-are-not/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:06:02.000Z **Where We Are Not** is a poetry book by Georgi Gospodinov, published in 2016\. The author often says that he smuggles poetry into his novels, but the opposite is also true - we can find unwritten novels smuggled into his poems. Marie Vrinat-Nikolov’s French translation of the collection, *There Where We Are Not* (*Là où nous ne sommes pas*), won the 2024 Prix Mallarmé étranger, the country’s highest award for poetry in translation. ### Weddings of Animals and Things URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/weddings-of-animals-and-things/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:07:15.000Z This is a book for children, and not only, featuring words and drawings by Raya Gospodinova and her father, Georgi Gospodinov. It explores the invisible life of the things around us and the fantasies of late afternoons, when both young and old are ready to invent games. What would happen if...a sofa and a crocodile, a turtle and a cupboard, a book and ice cream, a camel and a teapot came together? A book that whispers: Come on, now it’s your turn. ### And All Turned Moon URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/and-all-turned-moon/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:08:27.000Z Nineteen stories - some of which first appeared in anthologies of European short stories and in collections in various languages - are now brought together for the first time in a single volume, twelve years after *And Other Stories*. Tales of love and endings, with a premonition of a miracle, as Gaustin would say. ### The Invisible Crises URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/the-invisible-crises/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:09:18.000Z A book of essays exploring some of Gospodinov’s favorite topics, such as past and memory, everyday life and the sublime, the denied world, and the importance of the things that never happened. ### The Ethernal Fly URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/the-ethernal-fly/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:10:14.000Z In short, this is the novel of an eternal fly in an ephemeral world. Amid the jungle of Spider-Men, Tarzans, Mickey Mouses, ducks, and the like - this whole Noah’s Ark of comic-book culture - a fly bursts in. The history of the world and of art is told through the facetious eye of a fly. A non-anthropocentric graphic novel. ### D.J., The Apocalypse Comes at 6 PM URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/d-j-the-apocalypse-comes-at-6-pm/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:11:25.000Z This book contains two of Gospodinov’s plays - ***D.J.*** (an abbreviation of Don Juan) and **The Apocalypse Comes at 6 PM** \-both of which received national awards for Best Dramatic Text of the Year. ### Oh, Henry URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/oh-henry/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:12:06.000Z **3 Christmas Stories** In fact, there are seven stories in this book. Three are visible, the fourth is hidden (conspired), the fifth is filmed, and the sixth and seventh are illustrated. It is a tribute to what Christmas is made of - late gifts, pigs’ souls, and stories of disagreements in which there is more love than in all the meetings in the world. ### Ballads and Maladies URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/baladies-and-maladies/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:14:22.000Z **Ballads and Maladies** brings together, for the first time, three poetry books in a single volume. In the stone garden of *Lapidarium* grows *The Cherry Tree of a Nation*, and beneath it someone writes *Letters to Gaustin* and new poems. ### The Inventory Book of Socialism URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/the-inventory-book-of-socialism/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:16:33.000Z Almost 20 years after the first edition of **The Inventory Book of Socialism**, which had long been out of print, a second edition was published containing additional materials. The book includes over 500 objects from everyday life under socialism. ### Letters to Gaustin URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/letters-to-gaustin/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:18:20.000Z This poetry book was published in 2003\. The figure of Gaustin appears here in the form of a few letters written by him. ### Natural Novel URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/natural-novel-2/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:41:45.000Z **THE NEW YORKER, 2005** Gospodinov’s anarchic, experimental début concerns a young writer, the narrator, whose marriage breaks up after his wife becomes pregnant by someone else. But this plot is little more than the framework for a lively assortment of fragments—dreams, lists, projected attempts to write a novel entirely with verbs or a Bible for flies, and a chapter called “Towards a Natural History of the Toilet.” Inevitably, a book that takes such risks occasionally falls on its face; some of Gospodinov’s scatology feels self-conscious, and pop-culture references, presumably intended to seem wised-up and Western, come off as just the reverse. But the hits outnumber the misses, and there is something engaging about the novel’s stubborn refusal to amount to anything. As the narrator announces, “My immodest desire is to mold a novel of beginnings, a novel that keeps starting, promising something, reaching page 17 and then starting again”. [**Here is the review**](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/03/14/natural-novel?ref=georgigospodinov.com) ### And Other Stories URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/and-other-stories/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:19:25.000Z Gospodinov’s first collection of short stories, **And Other Stories** (2001), has been translated into English, French, German, Czech, Italian, Polish, Serbian, Macedonian. In 2007, the English version of the book was longlisted for Frank O’Connor Award. In 2012, the Polish version was nominated for The Angelus Central European Literature Award. Gospodinov’s stories have been included in the anthologies Best European Fiction 2010 (ed. Aleksandar Hemon, Dalkey Archive Press) and Passport to Crime. The Finest Mystery Stories from International Crime Writers (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, 2007). His writing, characterised as it is by subtle humour, is often teasingly ironic and self-deprecating while at the same time attempts to chart serious subject matters: Western metafiction meets East European metaphysics. Gospodinov’s stories are full of wonderful surprises, imaginative turns and engaging language, but their main concern seems to be the pursuit of redeeming distance from the ugly immediacy of facts. **World Literature Today**, Aleš Debeljak At less than a hundred pages, this volume stands in stark contrast to sprawling style of so much contemporary postmodern fiction. The lapidary prose combined with the silence of white spaces gives And Other Stories the faint air of poetry, of Japanese haikus. Averse to pyrotechnics, the book can be likened to a match lighting the mind’s cigarette, followed by a deep puff and the fizz of burning tobacco. There is relaxation here, a savouring that lingers. Words are not watered-down substances; each has a particular taste. **Boston Review,** Dimiter Kenarov With Georgi Gospodinov, you plunge in an imaginary world where every letter refers to a woman, every word oscillates between sadness and sense of humor… **Le Nouvel Observateur** In his short stories, the writer \[Georgi Gospodinov\] likes to blend, a la Rabelais, trivial and sublime, banal and exceptional, jokes and erudition, History and everyday life. **Page, France** I rarely read short story collections in one go. But this book compels me. Perhaps it is the brevity of each of the pieces – the longest, ‘Gaustine’, stretches to an epic seven pages – most of which have the length of a long breath, that draws me to turn the page and begin again. A few hours later, I too am fifty years older. **Thresholds, UK** ### The Cherry Tree of a Nation URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/the-cherry-tree-of-a-nation/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:21:01.000Z This is Georgi Gospodinov’s second poetry book and one of the most important poetry collections of the 1990s. Published in 1996, the book has had several editions and was chosen as Book of the Year by the Association of Bulgarian Writers. It reflects on what happened and what did not happen in Bulgarian history. Here, the name of his later character and alter ego, Gaustin, appears for the first time. ### The Story Smuggler URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/the-story-smuggler-2/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:42:22.000Z TONY\`S READING LIST - Review by Tony Malone **The Story Smuggler** (translated by **Kristina Kovacheva** and **Dan Gunn**) is Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s personal take on youth, writing and the untranslatable concept of Тъга (‘taga’), a sense of melancholy that pervades his native land. Over twenty-five brief chapters, he examines his life and career, allowing the reader a glimpse into young Georgi’s experiences behind the Iron Curtain and showing the influences that helped make him a writer. Before we go any further, though, we need to find out a little more about Тъга: > ***It is not sadness, nor exactly* sorrow*, nor is it* melancholy*. The word cannot be translated into English without the entire Slavic concept behind it. In* Тъга *there is longing, something unrealised, a dream of what has been lost forever or of what has never been achieved.* Тъга *does not overwhelm you all at once, it doesn’t topple you like a wave; her waters are placid, her poison is slow, enfeebling.*** > **p.17 (Sylph Editions, 2016)** While other languages have similar concepts, he argues, such as the Portuguese saudade, these have the sense of a longing for what once was, what we’ve lost. Тъга, on the other hand, is a desolate sense of missing what never was in the first place… It’s an appropriate emotion for Gospodinov’s home environment. He skilfully sketches out a youth spent in a country where colour was in short supply, the schoolkids’ scrapbook ‘lexikons’ furtive attempts to bring the rainbow into a rather monochrome existence. It’s little wonder that the poet in the boy tends towards the morose, producing a piece dominated by thoughts of the passing of time and death (causing the visiting state-sanctioned poet to angrily berate the child and the teacher for not following the approved themes of sunrise, the mother party and the dove of peace!). In such a society, ideas, like western goods, need to be smuggled in, and the concept of the smuggler permeates the writer’s memories. We learn of people smuggling babies’ belly buttons across the border (in the superstitious hope that the child will one day follow it abroad), bibles hidden in dictionaries and even historical examples, with monks smuggling their feelings into the books they transcribe in the form of marginalia. The young Georgi, longing for treats unavailable in his home land, even attempts to smuggle cakes out of his dreams – alas, this contraband never makes it past the stern border guards of the waking mind… > Gospodinov’s most recent novel in English, [***The Physics of Sorrow***](http://www.openletterbooks.org/collections/georgi-gospodinov/products/the-physics-of-sorrow?ref=georgigospodinov.com) (translated by **Angela Rodel**, published by **Open Letter Books**) is a book I’ve long been thinking about trying, and reading ***The Story Smuggler*** has only tempted me further. It’s a beautiful little piece, elegantly written with a wry humour throughout, and if one of the aims of these Cahiers is to get you to go on and explore more of the author’s work, then (in this case, at least) it’s a job well done 🙂. For more follow the link [**HERE** ](https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/2016/12/08/to-begin-at-the-beginning-by-javier-marias-the-story-smuggler-by-georgi-gospodinov-review/?ref=georgigospodinov.com) ### Lapidarium URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/lapidarium/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T18:21:50.000Z **Lapidarium** is the first poetry collection by Gospodinov, published in 1992\. It won the National Prize for Best Literary Debut, Yuzhna Prolet. "My first poetry book brought together very short poems, sometimes just two or three lines long. I remember writing many of them on the backs of bus tickets. It was fortunate that the book was noticed", says Gospodinov.