Top honour for darkly comic novel on nostalgia
Bulgarian writer and translator win Booker with story about clinic that recreates the past
It is a great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future, where the past is reinvented
LEILA SLIMANI, FRENCH NOVELIST
Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel have won the International Booker Prize for Time Shelter, a darkly comic novel about the dangerous appeal of nostalgia.
The book beat five other finalists to the prize, which recognises fiction from around the world that has been translated into English.
The £50,000 (HK$486,250) in prize money is divided between author and translator.
Time Shelter imagines a clinic that recreates the past, with each floor reproducing a different decade.
Intended as a way to help people with dementia unlock their memories, it soon becomes a magnet for people eager to escape the modern world.
French novelist Leila Slimani, who chaired the judging panel, said it was “a brilliant novel full of irony and melancholy”.
“It’s a very profound work that deals with a contemporary question and also a philosophical question: what happens to us when our memories disappear?” she said.
“But it is also a great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future, where the past is reinvented and where nostalgia can be a poison.”
Gospodinov is one of Bulgaria’s most-translated authors. Time Shelter has also won Italy’s Strega European Prize for literature in Italian translation.
The International Booker Prize is awarded every year to a translated work of fiction published in the UK or Ireland. It is run alongside the Booker Prize for Englishlanguage fiction, which will be handed out in the autumn.
The prize was set up to boost the profile of fiction in other languages and to salute the underappreciated work of literary translators.