INVC NEWS
London : Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel have won the International Booker Prize for the novel Time Shelter. Time Shelter beat five other books in the running to win the prize, which recognizes novels from around the world that have been translated into English.
The prize money of $62,000 will be split between the author and the translator. Time Shelter tells the story of a clinic that recreates the past with each floor representing a different decade and aims to help people with dementia. Suffers and has forgotten the old things, but soon people start getting attracted to it as an escape from the modern world.
The novel’s author, Gospodinov, said he began writing in 2016, the year of Donald Trump’s election as US president and the UK’s Brexit referendum. It was a time when there was an atmosphere of restlessness everywhere. He said that I wanted to write a novel about the giant of the past. French novelist Leila Slimani, chair of the judging panel, said it was a wonderful novel full of irony and depression.
Georgi Gospodinov is one of the few Bulgarian writers whose novels have been translated. The Italian translation of ‘Time Shelter’ has also won Italy’s ‘Strega European Prize’ for literature.
