First Bulgarian book nominated for International Booker Prize

Sofia, March 14 (BTA/GNA) – Time Shelter of Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov is on the longlist for the 2023 International Booker Prize, his publisher Zhanet 45 said Tuesday.

No other Bulgarian-language book has been nominated for the International Booker Prize. The other two languages which are introduced for the first time on the longlist are Catalan and Tamil, the Booker Prize website says.

Gospodinov’s novel is translated by Angela Rodel.

The longlist includes 13 works selected from among 134 submissions. The shortlist will be announced on April 18 during the London Book Fair and it will include six of the longlist entrants. The winner will be named at a London gala on May 23.

Time Shelter is in the company of the following other longlistees:

Ninth Building (written by Zou Jingzhi and translated by Jeremy Tiang)
A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding (written by Amanda Svensson and translated by Nichola Smalley)
Still Born (written by Guadalupe Nettel and translated by Rosalind Harvey)
Pyre (written by Perumal Murugan and translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan)
While We Were Dreaming (written by Clemens Meyer and translated by Katy Derbyshire)
The Birthday Party (written by Laurent Mauvignier and translated by Daniel Levin Becker)
Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv (written by Andrey Kurkov and translated by Reuben Woolley)
Is Mother Dead (written by Vigdis Hjorth and translated by Charlotte Barslund)
Standing Heavy (written by GauZ’ and translated by Frank Wynne)
The Gospel According to the New World (written by Maryse Condé and translated by Richard Philcox)
Whale (written by Cheon Myeong-kwan and translated by Chi-Young Kim)
Boulder (written by Eva Baltasar and translated by Julia Sanches)
The panel of judges is chaired by the prize-winning French-Moroccan novelist, Leila Slimani. 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 International Booker Prize highlights fiction from all five continents, translated into English.

The winners’ prize purse is GBP 50,000 equally divided between the author and the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators). There is a prize of GBP 5,000 for each of the shortlisted titles: GBP 2,500 for the author and GBP 2,500 for the translator (or divided equally between multiple translators).

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