Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov Wins 2023 International Booker Prize
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.
"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)
