The International Booker was awarded to a Bulgarian writer for the first time

The novel “Shelter of Time” by the Bulgarian writer Georgy Gospodinov won the International Booker Prize.

The art book tells about the opening of a clinic for people with Alzheimer’s disease. On the floors of the hospital, the atmosphere of past decades has been recreated in detail: from furniture and drinks to daily newspapers of the corresponding period. The clinic became famous – and healthy people began to come to it to escape the horrors of modern life.

The jury called the book “a brilliant novel full of irony and melancholy” and “a great novel about Europe.” “This is a very deep work that touches on a modern philosophical question: what happens to us when our memories disappear?” said the chairman of the jury, Leila Slymany.

Gospodinov became the first Bulgarian writer to receive the International Booker. He will share the award in the amount of 50 thousand pounds sterling with the translator of the novel into English Angela Rodel, whose work the jury called “masterful and delicate”.