Booker Prize Author Set to Deliver Lancaster International Fiction Lecture

This year’s International Booker Prize winner Georgi Gospodinov will present the third Lancaster International Fiction Lecture.

The Lecture, a joint online venture between Lancaster’s Litfest and the University’s Department of Languages & Cultures and the Department of English Literature & Creative Writing, will take place on Monday, October 23 at 7.30pm.

Georgi Gospodinov’s novel, Time Shelter, written in Bulgarian and translated into English by Angela Rodel, won this year’s International Booker Prize.

In an interview for the International Booker Prize Gospodinov said: “My urge to write [Time Shelter] came from the sense that something had gone awry in the clockworks of time.

“You could catch the scent of anxiety hanging in the air, you could touch it with your finger. After 2016 we seemed to be living in another world and another time… I come from a system that sold a ‘bright future’ under communism.

“Now the stakes have shifted, and populists are selling a ‘bright past’. I know via my own skin that both cheques bounce, they are backed by nothing.”

Georgi Gospodinov is one of Europe’s most acclaimed writers. Originally from Bulgaria, his novels, The Physics of Sorrow and Time Shelter, have won his country’s most prestigious literary prize twice and more than a dozen international prizes – including the International Booker Prize, Premio Strega Europeo, Central European Angelus Award and the Jan Michalski Prize.