Georgi Gospodinov

Gospodinov trained as a literary scholar in Sofia and made his name first as a poet before turning to fiction; his debut novel, Natural Novel, and later The Physics of Sorrow built an international readership for a voice equally at home in melancholy and playful formal experiment.

Time Shelter (2020) opens a clinic where each floor painstakingly recreates a different past decade to calm dementia patients, a therapy so popular that whole countries begin holding referendums on which decade to move back into: Gospodinov's allegory for a Europe retreating into nostalgia and nationalism rather than facing the present.

Its English translation won the International Booker Prize in 2023, the first for a Bulgarian novel, awarded jointly to Gospodinov and his translator Angela Rodel.