The International Booker Prize 2023 Winner
It is our great pleasure to confirm Time Shelter, written by Georgi Gospodinov and translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel as the winner of the 2023 International Booker Prize. Both author and translator share the award.
The first Bulgarian book to have won the prize, this magnificent novel opens the doors to a very special sanatorium – a ‘clinic of the past’ set up to help Alzheimer's patients, where each floor represents a different decade in intricate detail and which soon starts drawing in healthy people too, seeking to escape the tedium of modern life. Endlessly playful, ironic and deeply philosophical, Time Shelter mines the intimate and precarious ways memory narrates our identities and national stories, shedding light on the dangers of nostalgia and our constant compulsion to reinvent the past.
‘Time Shelter is a brilliant novel, full of irony and melancholy. It is a profound work that deals with a very contemporary question: What happens to us when our memories disappear? Gospodinov succeeds marvellously in dealing with both individual and collective destinies and it is this complex balance between the intimate and the universal that convinced and touched us.’
LEILA SLIMANI, CHAIR OF JUDGES
An Exclusive Q&A with Georgi Gospodinov on Time Shelter
The 2023 International Booker Prize-winning author and translator discuss Time Shelter.
The Shortlist
The International Booker Prize 2023 Longlist
Previous Winners
Sign In / Register
Sign In
Download the Waterstones App
Would you like to proceed to the App store to download the Waterstones App?