Meet the author: Georgi Gospodinov
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Meet the author
The meetings with writers at Passa Porta, prepared with passion, courage and thoroughness, are more than simply the presentation of literary works. We seek to achieve a genuine connection between writer and reader, and among readers themselves.
Go to overviewHe had already won the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature in 2016 for The Physics of Sorrow. Now Georgi Gospodinov has been awarded the International Booker Prize for Time Shelter (published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson), a truly exceptional novel in which the enfant terrible of Bulgarian literature interweaves past and present, the personal and the universal, collective and individual memory, the lives of humans and animals, and a sense of the sublime and of melancholy.
In the 1990s, a Bulgarian writer befriends a certain Gaustine during a literary symposium. Gaustine gives him letters dating back to the 1930s before disappearing. In his search for Gaustine, the narrator discovers a mysterious Viennese clinic that offers its patients the chance to relive the best years of their life: a ‘clinic for the past’. The idea seems simple and quite harmless, but the temptation to escape the present can prove perilous: what would become of Europe if its member states were won over by this desire? In Time Shelter, a novel that is bursting with creativity, the great Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov questions our individual and political relation to nostalgia and invites us to look into the seductive mirror of memories.
Nostalgic and ironic
Translated into more than thirty languages, Gospodinov has been recognized by international critics as one of Europe’s finest postmodern novelists. Particularly inventive and managing to be at once nostalgic and ironic, funny and political, his novels interweave collective memory (that of socialism) and individual memory (that of childhood). An exceptional evening.
Libération
Corriere della Sera
About the author
Born in 1968, Georgi Gospodinov is one of the leading authors of the new generation of Bulgarian writers. He is the author of the novels Natural Novel (which thoroughly reinvigorated Bulgarian prose) and The Physics of Sorrow and of short stories (And Other Stories and The Story Smuggler) and essays. A poet (five collections) and playwright (two plays), he is also a literary critic and a contributor to the journals Literatouren vestnik and Dnevnik. Most of his works have been reissued in Bulgaria, and he has received several national prizes and is, to date, the most translated contemporary Bulgarian writer. His latest novel, Time Shelter (translated into English by Angela Rodel, published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson), has just been awarded the International Booker Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards.
In partnership with the Bulgarian Embassy, the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Belgium and Veen Bosch & Keuning.
picture © Dafinka Stoilova
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