Time Shelter

Georgi Gospodinov is Bulgaria’s best-known contemporary writer, whose work includes poetry, plays, essays and graphic novels. He has been shortlisted for more than a dozen international fiction 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. He won the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the 2019 Angelus Literature Central Europe Prize and the 2021 Premio Strega Europe, among others.  

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 animated film that was nominated for an Oscar in 2017.

Angela Rodel, originally from Minnesota, USA, lives and works in Bulgaria. She holds degrees from Yale and UCLA, and has received NEA and PEN translation grants. Her translation of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow won the 2016 AATSEEL Prize for Literary Translation. In 2014, she was awarded Bulgarian citizenship for her translation work and contribution to Bulgarian culture. 

Her poetry and prose translations have also appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including McSweeney’s, Little Star, Ploughshares, Granta.org, Two Lines, and Words Without Borders, among others. In 2014, she was awarded Bulgarian citizenship for her translation work and contribution to Bulgarian culture.

As well as working as a literary translator – and teaching literary translation in Bulgaria – she has also been a singer in a Bulgarian folk band, acted in a Bulgarian crime drama, and starred in a film, Kozelat, in which she rides a goat.

‘An inventive, subversive and morbidly humorous novel about national identities and the seductive dangers of memory and nostalgia. 

‘Part of a tradition of East Central Europe that includes Milan Kundera, Dubravka Ugrešić and Danilo Kiš, it’s a fresh staging of old questions: the danger of selective memory, the inheritance of trauma, and how nostalgia can take a grip on society and become a comfort blanket – or a cancer. 

‘It compels us to question our concepts of identity: not just national, individual, societal, but also historical and temporal. How much do we reshape the past to suit our present and our future? In addition to the borders dividing countries, we see that time and memory are also different forms of borders. How do individuals, nations, even continents, decide on what to remember, and what to forget?  The novel also makes us contemplate the very concept of Time itself in a different way. Nostalgia is more than what it used to be.’