Georgi Gospodinov's Time Shelter playlist: the prize-winning novel in 12 songs
Georgi Gospodinov, winner of the International Booker Prize 2023, takes us through the songs and music that inspired his novel Time Shelter
Georgi Gospodinov
Winner of the International Booker Prize 2023, Georgi Gospodinov was born in Yambol, Bulgaria, and his works have been translated to acclaim in 25 languages
Georgi Gospodinov is the most translated and internationally awarded Bulgarian writer to emerge after the fall of communism. His novels, poems, essays, screenplays and graphic novels have established him as one of the leading voices of European literature.
Gospodinov’s novels have been shortlisted for more than a dozen international prizes – including the PEN Literary Award for Translation, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, the Bruecke Berlin Preis, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Literaturpreis – and have won the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature and the 2019 Angelus Literature Central Europe Prize, among others. He was described by La Repubblica as ‘a Proust from the East’.
Time Shelter is his third novel to be published in English. The Italian edition of the book won the prestigious Premio Strega Europeo prize last year.
His graphic novel The Eternal Fly was the first Bulgarian graphic novel and his short story ‘Blind Vaysha’ was adapted into a short animation film that was nominated for an Oscar in 2017.
A wide-ranging, thought-provoking, macabre and humorous novel about nationality, identity and ageing, and about the healing and destructive power of memory.
— The International Booker Prize 2023 panel of judges on 'Time Shelter'
Watch our films
- By
- Georgi Gospodinov
- Translated by
- Angela Rodel
- Published by
- Weidenfeld & Nicolson
A ‘clinic for the past’ run by an enigmatic therapist offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time to a familiar, safer, happier moment.
