‘Nationalism is an anti-natural thing’: International Booker-winning author Georgi Gospodinov

Georgi Gospodinov explores memory, storytelling, and the dangers of nationalism in his award-winning novel, Time Shelter.

Georgi Gospodinov loves the concept of memory. “I believe that it is connected to writing and storytelling. We began to write, ages ago, to create memory and give it to the next generation,” says the Bulgarian novelist, whose 2020 book, Time Shelter, translated by Angela Rodel, won the International Booker Prize in 2023, the first Bulgarian-language novel to be nominated for the prestigious literary award.

Memory, and the loss of it, is also the central idea of Time Shelter, whose mysterious protagonist, Gaustine, is a psychiatrist who creates clinics for people with Alzheimer’s disease, enabling them to travel back to the era where they felt safer and happier. “It is a very important topic for me, both literally and metaphorically,” says Gospodinov, raising his voice to be heard over the din of cutlery and conversation at lunch at the recently-concluded Kerala Literature Festival.

“Memory has one very important function: to recognise the past and to draw a red line between the past and the present because it is not good when they are mixed,” he says. Edited excerpts from an interview:

A:Time Shelter is about the return of time, constructing the new past in the present moment. When I started to write this book in 2016, this feeling of anxiety was in the air. One of the reasons was Trump, who had just come to power in the U.S., and the second was Brexit. And what I see now, unfortunately, is that this has happened again with Trump 2.0.

We are trying to return to that world from yesterday, which has completely disappeared. Sometimes, I feel that we’re in the 1980s, sometimes in the 90s, sometimes we’re returning to World War II. It’s a constant moving between the times because I think we lost our values and sense of identity. But these attempts could be dangerous. That is the subject of my novel, and yes, it is more timely than ever before.

A: You know what is wrong? Sometimes, we forget that we are living in a network where every person is connected to everyone. Nationalism is an anti-natural thing because, in nature, everything is connected with everything: birds, the sea, fish…

Nationalism tries to limit this connection, to cut out this connection, and to say that we are the only important things. Our nation is the most important, and we should have our golden age, even if it hurts other nations. You cannot be a happy nation as an isolated nation.