Georgy Gospodinov Takes Home the Booker Prize for Writing

Moscow, May 24 – Bulgarian writer Georgy Gospodinov won the International Booker Prize this year for his novel Shelter, according to the award’s website.

The report said, “Georgy Gospodinov and Angela Rudel (translator – editor) won the 2023 International Booker Prize for the novel ‘The Shelter’.”

The novel was published in Bulgarian in 2020, followed by an English translation in 2022. At the center of the story is the story of the treatment center “Back to the Past”, where patients with Alzheimer’s disease are treated in an unusual way. The summary of the novel says that patients pass through the floors of the clinic, each of which reproduces the past decade in great detail, thanks to which people can extract from their memory what they have already forgotten.

Shelter is a wonderful novel full of irony and gloom. This is a profound work that raises a contemporary question: What happens to us when our memories disappear? Georgy Gospodinov writes with astonishing success about individual and collective destinies, and it is this complex balance between the personal and the general that persuaded and moved us.”

The International Booker Prize was established in 2005. Unlike the Booker Prize, which is awarded annually to English-language authors from the United Kingdom, Ireland and the Commonwealth, the International Booker Prize for Foreign Writers is awarded for books translated into English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The winner gets £50,000 to share with the translator.