Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov wins International Booker Prize

Showing all posts tagged: International Booker Prize

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov wins International Booker Prize

24 May 2023

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, book cover.

Georgi Gospodinov, described as the most translated and internationally awarded Bulgarian writer after 1989, has won the 2023 International Booker Prize, for his 2022 novel Time Shelter.

Translated by American literary translator Angela Rodel, Gospodinov’s fourth book features a curious medical facility that assists Alzheimer’s patients, by masquerading as a time machine:

In Time Shelter, an enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a ‘clinic for the past’ that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time.

As Gaustine’s assistant, the unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a ‘time shelter’, hoping to escape from the horrors of our present — a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present.

The winning author and translator each receive half of the £50,000 prize money on offer. If there had been an award for best book cover of the International Booker Prize shortlist, I would have adjudged Time Shelter the winner at the time I wrote about the shortlist.

The 2023 International Booker Prize shortlist

18 April 2023

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, book cover.

The 2023 International Booker Prize shortlist was announced earlier this evening (east coast of Australia time) at the London Book Fair, and includes these six titles:

Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated from Catalan by Julia Sanches
The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé, translated from French by Richard Philcox
Standing Heavy by GauZ’, translated from French by Frank Wynne
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel
Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim
Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey

The International Booker Prize is awarded annually for the finest single work of fiction from around the world which has been translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The winner will be named in London on Tuesday 23 May 2023.

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree wins International Booker Prize

27 May 2022

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, bookcover

Tomb of Sand (published by Penguin Random House India, March 2022) by New Delhi based Indian author Geetanjali Shree, and translated by Daisy Rockwell, has been named winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize.

In northern India, an eighty-year-old woman slips into a deep depression after the death of her husband, and then resurfaces to gain a new lease on life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention – including striking up a friendship with a transgender person – confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more ‘modern’ of the two. To her family’s consternation, Ma insists on travelling to Pakistan, simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition, and re-evaluating what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, a feminist.

Frank Wynne, Booker Prize judges chair, described Tomb of Sand, also the first novel originally written in any Indian language, and the first book translated from Hindi, to win the award, thusly:

This is a luminous novel of India and partition, but one whose spellbinding brio and fierce compassion weaves youth and age, male and female, family and nation into a kaleidoscopic whole.

The 2022 International Booker Prize shortlist

8 April 2022

The 2022 International Booker Prize shortlist was announced yesterday, and includes the following six titles:

Heaven, by Mieko Kawakami
Elena Knows, by Claudia Piñeiro
A New Name: Septology VI-VII, by Jon Fosse
Tomb of Sand, by Geetanjali Shree
The Books of Jacob, by Olga Tokarczuk
Cursed Bunny, by Bora Chung

The first thing that grabbed me when looking at the shortlisted titles was the variation in their size. For instance Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven is about 192 pages in length, while The Books of Jacob, by Olga Tokarczuk, weighs in at some 990 pages.

That’s a little bit of reading for those who’d like to familiarise themselves with the six works, before the winner is named on Thursday 26 May 2022.

RELATED CONTENT

awards, International Booker Prize