Der Literarische Salon mit Georgi Gospodinov

Bulgarian Georgi Gospodinov, born in Sofia in 1968, is one of the best-known and most translated authors in Europe. He won the International Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, with his latest novel "Zeitzuflucht" (Time Refuge): In a clinic of the future, dementia patients can wallow in the rooms of their childhood: Each floor is dedicated to a decade. But suddenly healthy people also want to be admitted to the clinic, and not just healthy people, but entire countries that want to escape the present: "A breathtaking novel from the past about the present", cheered DIE ZEIT, and the Times has already called Gospodinov a classic and his vision of the future "a nightmare from which Europe must awaken today". His new novel "The Gardener and Death" will be published in German this fall, and he is bringing it to Cologne almost hot off the press. What is it about? Gospodinov told us that it is his most personal book and tells of his own father's death: "My father was this atlas that carried tons of the past on his shoulders. The book describes the feeling of how all this past began to shatter and came crashing down on me with a soft crack."