We have joined forces with global film distributor and streaming service MUBI, the award-winning bookseller Foyles, and London’s The Garden Cinema, which champions international film, on a new competition and a very special live event. 

We believe there is a natural union between international fiction and international film, and between the readers and viewers of both. We therefore want to encourage people who love translated fiction to explore more global cinema, and vice versa, so we asked the team at MUBI to match six great films from their global roster with the books on this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist. You can find out more about the films here.   

On May 26, The Garden Cinema, a new independent cinema in the heart of London, will host a special live event: an intimate Q&A featuring the 2023 International Booker Prize winners Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel, hosted by writer and editor Sarah Shaffi. The Q&A will be followed by a screening of One Fine Morning, directed by Mia Hansen-Løve (France, Germany, 2022), which MUBI has paired with this year’s winning novel, Time Shelter. Tickets are available here.

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from Bulgarian by Angel Rodel

A ‘clinic for the past’ offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. But an increasing number of healthy people seek refuge at the clinic, hoping to escape the horrors of modern life.

One Fine Morning directed by Mia Hansen-Løve (France, Germany, 2022)

In Paris, a young, widowed mother juggles her job as a translator with caring both for her young daughter and her elderly father, who suffers from a degenerative illness. Her life is further complicated when she embarks on a passionate affair with an old friend in an unhappy marriage.

Georgi Gospodinov 

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 today. 

La Repubblica described him as ‘A Proust coming from the East’ and he has been praised for ‘smuggling poetry into fiction, his style is both poetic and philosophical yet readable, funny, self-ironic.’ He held a Cullmann Fellowship at the New York Public Library in 2017. 

Time Shelter is the third of his books to be published in English and it won the prestigious European Strega 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. 

His books are translated into 25 languages. 

Angela Rodel 

Angela Rodel was born in Minnesota, USA and is a professional literary translator living and working in Bulgaria. She holds a B.A. from Yale and an M.A. from UCLA in linguistics. She received a 2014 NEA translation grant for Georgi Gospodinov’s novel The Physics of Sorrow, as well as a 2010 PEN Translation Fund Grant for Georgi Tenev’s short story collection Holy Light, the first time a Bulgarian language work has received either award. Her translation of 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.