site.btaInternational Booker Prize Winner Georgi Gospodinov: Every Book Helps to Keep Ephemeral Things for Longer

Meeting with the audience at the Book on the Beach Festival in Burgas on Friday, Writer Georgi Gospodinov, whose novel Time Shelter won the International Booker Prize earlier this year, said: "Every book is a way to keep ephemeral things for longer. That is why I try to bring the transient into my work and perpetuate it."

"You can collect coins and stamps and matchboxes and cigarette boxes, but you can't collect tadpoles and clouds because they change, and you can't collect children because they grow up. Anything important is not collectible," Gospodinov added.

The writer said there is a huge wave of interest in literature from Central and Eastern Europe. Prominent literary critics and writers confirm this fact, including the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Svetlana Alexievich, who will be a guest at the 39th edition of the Apollonia Festival of Arts in Sozopol.

"When I was 6, I had a nightmare and I couldn't tell my grandmother because nightmares are not shared. So I wrote it down with the first letters I learned. And that was the first moment I realized that writing helped, because I never had that nightmare again. But I also never forgot it, I still remember it," Gospodinov  told the audience.

He talked about the response of the foreign media to the joy in Bulgaria after Time Shelter won the International Booker Prize. "Big media like the Guardian, The Times and the BBC asked me in interviews about the Bulgarians' joy. I simply said that this is a nation that has a national holiday dedicated to literacy and language, and that this nation is happy to have one of its writers win an award with his book. They were very impressed by that."

He was referring to May 24, celebrated as the Day of the Bulgarian Alphabet, Education and Culture and of Slav Letters.

Gospodinov's advice to writers who are at the start of their careers is not to give up, even when faced with a series of setbacks. "You learn to lose, and accept things as they are. Keep writing and pursuing your goals, and then success will find you."

"It takes a huge amount of solitude and patience to write a book. Getting into a book is like locking yourself in a room for two years," he said.

Gospodinov will be giving a masterclass in creative writing as part of the literary programme of the Apollonia Festival of Arts on September 1-3.