Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel have won the International Booker Prize 2023 for the novel Time Shelter. Time Shelter becomes the first novel originally published in Bulgarian to win the prize. In the book, a ‘clinic for the past’ offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. But soon the past begins to invade the present.
The panel of International Booker Prize 2023 judges is chaired by the prize-winning French-Moroccan novelist, Leïla Slimani, who announced the winning book at a ceremony at Sky Garden, London, on May 23. The panel also includes Uilleam Blacker, one of Britain’s leading literary translators from Ukrainian; Tan Twan Eng, the Booker-shortlisted Malaysian novelist; Parul Sehgal, staff writer and critic at the New Yorker; and Frederick Studemann, Literary Editor of the Financial Times.
The 2023 judges were looking for the best work of international fiction translated into English, selected from entries published in the UK or Ireland between May 1, 2022 and April 30, 2023.
