Everything you need to know about Time Shelter, winner of the International Booker Prize 2023

Leïla Slimani, Chair of the International Booker Prize 2023 judges said:

‘A jury is a complex thing, the alchemy of which is very subtle. It has been an exceptional literary and human experience to be able to discuss books with such passionate readers. Thank you to Parul Sehgal, Tan Twan Eng, Frederick Studemann and Uilleam Blacker; I feel privileged to have been able to feed myself with their culture and their sensitivity.

‘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.

‘In scenes that are burlesque as well as heartbreaking, he questions the way in which our memory is the cement of our identity and our intimate narrative. But it is also a great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future, where the past is reinvented, and nostalgia is a poison. It offers us a perspective on the destiny of countries like Bulgaria, which have found themselves at the heart of the ideological conflict between the West and the communist world. 

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

‘The translator, Angela Rodel, has succeeded brilliantly in rendering this style and language, rich in references and deeply free.

‘The past is only ever a story that is told. And not all storytellers have the talent of Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel.’

The author: Georgi Gospodinov

Georgi Gospodinov was born in Yambol, Bulgaria, and his works have been translated to acclaim in 25 languages. He 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.

The translator: Angela Rodel

Angela Rodel is a literary translator, musician and actor who lives and works in Bulgaria.

Originally from Minnesota, United States, Rodel holds degrees from Yale and UCLA, and has received NEA and PEN translation grants. Her translation of Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow won the National Book Center’s 2015 Peroto Prize for best translation from Bulgarian, the 2016 AATSEEL Prize for Best Book of Literary Translation and was nominated for the three most prestigious translation awards in the US: finalist for the 2016 PEN Translation Prize, the 2016 National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association, and Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award for 2016.

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.

Georgi Gospodinov said:

‘When I wrote Time Shelter, one of the books that was near to me was The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, because when you write a book about time you need The Magic Mountain; you need a Thomas Mann book. And also, because it’s a book about memory, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time was very important book to me. But also I could say some poems and some poets were very important, like W H. Auden and the famous poem 1 September, 1939. This poem plays a key role in the novel. 

‘Some songs were very important because it’s a novel about memory. And we know that songs unlock our memory. So songs like ‘Hotel California’ by The Eagles, or many songs by The Beatles. ‘Alabama’ song by The Doors was very important; this is a song written by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brech. The whole story of the song is in the novel.’