‘Keep telling your stories!’ says Georgi Gospodinov whose  Time Shelter has won the International Booker Prize

Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’ Time Shelter has won the International Booker Prize

The most resonant of global literary awards, the International Booker Prize, has broken new ground in selecting a novel initially written in Bulgarian as this year’s winner. The accolade has gone to Georgi Gospodinov’s  Time Shelter, a book described by the author in his acceptance speech as about ‘memory and time, the flood of the past and the weaponisation of nostalgia’.

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The choice has been widely applauded in the literary world. Novelist Elif Shafak, who writes in Turkish and English, tweeted that the decision was ‘truly wonderful news’.

Time Shelter (reviewed by the writer) is a hugely original and ambitious novel, touching on the temptation to retreat from a painful present to an imagined and unreal past, and dwelling on the totalitarian regimes and painful ruptures that have convulsed Europe, and Eastern Europe in particular, over the past century. At its core is the story of a clinical psychiatrist whose experiment to help dementia patients by locating them in the decade from which they take most comfort is so apparently successful that it is adopted at national level across Europe.

Leila Slimani, the distinguished Morocco-born novelist who chaired the judging panel, praised  Time Shelter as ‘a great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future, where the past is reinvented and nostalgia is a poison’. Gospodinov recently declared: “Don’t believe anyone who tries to sell you the past or the future, the cheques are empty.”

Gospodinov’s homeland was once in Moscow’s orbit. In selecting  Time Shelter, the award jury has chosen based on the excellence of his novel, but it may also be seen as reflecting on the existential struggle of another nation seeking to escape Russian dominance. Ukraine was not mentioned at the awards, but the winning author reflected in his remarks on the obligation, in time of war, “to tell the story from the side under attack.”

Since the reinventing of the International Booker Prize in 2015 — as an award for a novel or collection of short stories originally written in another language and published in English translation — it has gone to books written in eight different languages. No nation or language has won twice. This year’s short-listed novels included works in Catalan and in Korean.