<i>Time Shelter</i> wins 2023 International Booker Prize

The 2023 International Booker Prize has been won by Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel for the novel Time Shelter. This is the first novel originally published in Bulgarian to win the prize.

The International Booker Prize is awarded each spring for a winning work of fiction translated into English and published in the UK and Ireland. The winner gets £50,000: £25,000 for the author and £25,000 for the translator(s).

Gospodinov is Bulgaria's best-known contemporary writer, whose work includes poetry and plays, and has been shortlisted for numerous international fiction prizes. Rodel is a musician and literary translator who lives and works in Bulgaria and holds degrees from Yale and UCLA.

The winning title was announced on 23 May by French-Moroccan novelist and chair of the judging panel, Leïla Slimani, at a ceremony at Sky Garden, London. The panel calls Time Shelter "an inventive, subversive and morbidly humorous novel about national identities and the seductive dangers of memory and nostalgia."

In the novel, an enigmatic therapist opens a clinic for Alzheimer’s sufferers. Each room is furnished according to different time periods, promising to transport patients back to a familiar and safer time. But as the clinic becomes more popular, it draws unwanted attention and its concept is taken to new and potentially dangerous heights.

Slimani lauds the novel as "a profound work that deals with a very contemporary question: What happens to us when our memories disappear?" She adds that "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."

Gospodinov was compelled to write this book by the anxiety many felt as populism crept in worldwide. "I come from a system that sold a 'bright future' under communism," he states. "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. And that’s why I wanted to tell this story about the 'referendums on the past', undertaken by every European country. How does one live with a deficit of meaning and future? What do we do when the pandemic of the past engulfs us?"

He also suspects that his books are "not at all easy to translate", and credits Rodel with "truly impressive work with her translation, because she often had to translate not only the text itself, but the context of all the stories inside the novel."

When Time Shelter made the shortlist, Rodel seemed over the moon. According to her, translation "has long been seen as 'second fiddle' to writing, with translators providing a harmonic backdrop for the true virtuosos. ... But the International Booker Prize brings this harmony to the forefront, emphasising that all translation is a duet whose true beauty would not be possible without both voices or both melodies coming together."

She also added that "winning the prize would also put a spotlight on Bulgarian literature, which has long felt as if it is relegated to 'second fiddle' on the world literature stage."

Now that this award is in the bag for Gospodinov and Rodel, perhaps we'll see if that will happen, and not just to Bulgarian literature.