Gospodinov

Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov, 56, won last year’s International Booker prize (with translator Angela Rodel) for his dystopian comedy Time Shelter, about an innovative dementia clinic that restages the past. His previous novel, The Physics of Sorrow, an unorthodox coming-of-age tale drawn on Greek myth and the history of communist Europe, is now published for the first time in the UK, alongside his 80-page memoir, The Story Smuggler. He lives in Sofia, Bulgaria.What explains the fragmentary nature of your…

In Time Shelter, Georgi Gospodinov, who won the International Booker Prize this year, explores the relationship between past, present, and future and unravels the collision of temporal dimensions that shape our lives. In this interview, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, the writer-poet-playwright discusses the challenges of navigating time, and the novel’s broader reflections on the human condition. He reflects on the moral and ethical dilemmas that arise from manipulating time, the interconnectedness of…

The idea for a novel involving a clinic of the past, where people with dementia are healed by immersion in the sights, sounds and smells of their youth, had been in Georgi Gospodinov’s head for more than a decade when 2016 rolled up. Then there was Brexit, which changed the landscape of a European Union to which his homeland, Bulgaria, had belonged since 2007. Then came Donald Trump. Gospodinov and his wife watched the US election results from a hotel room in Vienna and at 4am, when the winner was declared, his wife burst…

Georgi Gospodinov, who is widely regarded as a leading voice in European literature today, has made it to the shortlist of the 2023 International Booker Prize with his newest novel Time Shelter. Translated into English by Angela Rodel, it features a mysterious flaneur named Gaustine, who builds a clinic in Zurich, Switzerland, that promises to heal Alzheimer’s sufferers by reproducing a decade in minute detail thus taking patients back in time. The story is told by an unnamed narrator who has been entrusted with…

Life behind the iron curtain was an education in a certain kind of humour: dark, unsentimental and absurd. It understood that jokes had become shortcuts to the truth – apart from the bonus of laughter, they turned the wooden language of the regime against itself in ways that sincerity could not. My favourite joke from my time in 1980s Romania was: “Under communism, the future is always certain; it’s the past that keeps changing.” From the vantage point of 2022, it’s clear that this wasn’t just true of communism, and that…