What everybody is saying about Time Shelter winning the International Booker Prize

Declaring its win, Leïla Slimani, chair of the International Booker Prize judges, said it was ‘a brilliant novel, full of irony and melancholy’, adding that ‘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.’

As the winner was announced from the shortlist of six books, readers from across the world tuned in online, watching live. Those from Gospodinov’s home country were among the first to rejoice as Slimani revealed the winner. ‘Bulgaria is proud of you,’ commented Ljubomir Angelov, while another viewer, Беркан, excitedly declared: ‘Let the Bulgarian language be heard!’.

The two-hour time difference between the UK and Bulgaria meant the news broke as the clock struck midnight in Gospodinov’s homeland, where the country was about to mark its Cyrillic Alphabet Day - a unique celebration of literacy, education and culture. This serendipity was not lost on fans of the novel. 

‘This year’s celebration started with the great news #InternationalBookerPrize 2023 was awarded to [Bulgarian] writer #GeorgiGospodinov for “Time Shelter”’, wrote @LilyanaPavlova on Twitter, while on Instagram @thatssoss_poppygirl commented ‘at this moment and on this holiday, I am truly proud of the origin, heritage, literary and culture of Bulgaria!’.

Trade magazine The Bookseller commented it was ‘the second year in a row to have a new language which had never featured before in the prize’, referencing 2022’s winner, Tomb of Sand, which was originally written in Hindi, and remarked on the potential for it to fuel ‘a bigger appetite for translated fiction’. The Balkan Insight claimed it would give ‘a major boost to the global visibility of Bulgaria’s literary scene’.

By lunchtime, the announcement was making a significant impact on sales and the novel climbed Amazon’s Movers and Shakers chart – a real-time overview of books that have made the biggest gains in the past 24 hours. Here, Time Shelter jumped a phenomenal 20,000%, climbing to #5. It then moved into the overall chart at #13, sitting amongst industry heavyweights, including Colleen Hoover’s TikTok sensation Verity and Nita Prose’s The Maid, a Sunday Times bestseller. 

Despite the sudden interest, Time Shelter didn’t go unnoticed when first published. The novel topped the Bulgarian book charts and its Italian translation won the prestigious Strega European Prize (Premio Strega Europeo) in 2021. 2018’s International Booker Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk described it as ‘the most exquisite kind of literature, on our perception of time and its passing, written in a masterful and totally unpredictable style, while La Repubblica called Gospodinov ‘a Proust coming from the East’. Finally, Bulgarian literature was attracting the world’s attention. 

Responding to the International Booker win, Manol Peykov, CEO and Managing Partner at Janet 45, the book’s Bulgarian publisher, told BTA, a local news agency, that ‘in its entire history, since the time of Simeon the Great, Bulgarian literature has never received such international recognition’, adding that this spotlight would create further interest for literature from the region abroad.

Gospodinov’s work might not have been familiar to English-speaking audiences until this week, but he has long been revered at home and in Europe. His back catalogue of over a dozen books includes poetry, collections of short stories, essays and Bulgaria’s first graphic novel. Born in 1968 in Yambol, he is one of Bulgaria’s leading contemporary voices, with his work translated into 25 languages to date. He is a writer of modernity, his work prescient – at times unnervingly so. Time Shelter was inspired by contemporary nostalgia-driven politics and populism such as Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ campaign. 

‘Brexit was the other trigger,’ Gospodinov told The Booker Prizes website earlier this year. ‘I come from a system that sold a “bright future” under communism. Now the stakes have shifted, and populists are selling a “bright past”. I know via my own skin that both cheques bounce, they are backed by nothing’.

While published before the war in Ukraine, the book foreshadows the beginning of a strikingly similar European conflict in its final scenes. Gospodinov has long been an outspoken critic of Putin – and now Russia’s invasion of its neighbour. In April of this year, he lambasted the regime in an article for The Guardian. Yet while many foreign authors and publishing houses have chosen to boycott Russia in protest, Gospodinov is doing the opposite. Speaking to RFE/RL’s Bulgarian Service, the author spoke recently of his plan to publish Time Shelter there, which he said was ‘frankly against this war, against nationalism and populism’, through a small publishing house in St. Petersburg. It is ‘aimed at Putin’, he told them.

The deep connection with his region’s complicated history - or as Leïla Slimani said, ‘the complex balance between the intimate and the universal’ - is a thread woven throughout all his works, which Gospodinov also referenced when speaking to the Arabic newspaper Al Majalla after his win. 

‘I believe that a person’s biography or life story holds greater significance to me than the grand narrative,’ he said, while alluding that readers could expect to see more tales from his home country imbued in his future work. 

‘I have consistently preferred intimate stories and have been deeply intrigued by the factors that contribute to an individual’s happiness or discomfort. Bulgaria harbours countless untold stories that I aspire to bring to light.’