The Bulgarian writer, winner of the International Booker Prize, has published his novels ‘Gardener and The Death’ and ‘The Physics of Sadness’ in Spain. In this interview, he speaks of memory, fear, grief, curiosity, and empathy, and of literature as a way to understand the world and defend the limits of humanity

learned to read on my own quite early, at the age of five. At that time, I lived with my grandmother in a small town in Bulgaria. When I finished all the books we had at home, she would go from house to house throughout the town, collecting any book she could find for me”.

This nomadic grandmother, always on the lookout for books, turned her grandson, Georgi Gospodinov (Yambol, 1968), not only into a passionate reader and a prominent European writer, but also into an itinerant author who explores various literary genres: poetry, short stories, novels, essays, nonfiction, and theater, as well as video installation art.

Perhaps this sensitivity stems from one of his earliest reading experiences:

“I vividly remember how deeply Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl affected me. I read it with complete empathy: I could feel the cold and loneliness of that Christmas night. I believe that story, for me the quintessential story of abandonment, profoundly marked my childhood and gave rise to fears that, over the years, I have tried to control through writing. I also remember that every afternoon, around six o’clock, my grandmother would secretly read the Bible by the window. I would sit beside her and listen. Through her whispering voice, I heard the entire Book of Revelation for the first time”.

Soon, writing entered Georgi Gospodinov’s life. The author recalls that time in an email interview.

“The first thing I ever wrote was about a nightmare that haunted me every night as a child. I wanted to tell my grandmother about it, but she put a finger to her lips and said that terrifying dreams should never be told, because otherwise they come to life. Or, as she put it, ‘they become bloody.’

I don’t know how the idea came to me, but I realized I could write it down. So I did, with my newly learned, clumsy, and uneven handwriting. And then a miracle happened: I never had that nightmare again. Yet I never forgot it. Even now, fifty years later, I remember it with perfect clarity.

I still believe that fear and nightmares are some of the best reasons to write. If it’s any consolation, writing helps us tame the beasts that dwell within us. After that, I began writing my own simple stories and poems, which I pretended to hide, though my grandmother and mother always managed to find them”.

Translated into more than thirty languages

Even then, poetry began to accompany him. Something essential in his personal and literary life, because it goes beyond his poetry collections: his poetic vision is also present in his narratives.

“The first poets, in my childhood, were the great classical Bulgarian poets: Dimcho Debelyanov, Peyo Yavorov, and Ivan Vazov. Later, I discovered poets like Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Prévert, and the entire French tradition. Then came Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Eastern poetry, followed by T. S. Eliot, whom I read constantly, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Joseph Brodsky, the Beat poets, and many others. I continue to read poetry with the same devotion and continue to write it. For me, poetry remains the shortest path to the inexpressible”.

That literary pilgrimage took place during the years when Bulgaria was a socialist state under the Soviet Union. In 1989, the Bulgarian communist regime fell, and Gospodinov already had some writing to his name. In the early 1990s, he published two poetry collections and closed out the decade in 1999 with his first foray into a different genre, Natural Novel.

His work, translated into more than thirty languages, includes novels such as Gardener and The Death (one of WMagazín’s 2025 books of the year), Physics of Sadness and The Tempests (winner of the 2023 International Booker Prize), as well as the short story collection On the Theft of Stories.

Poetry, Prose, and Memory

An interest in historical memory, inequalities, injustices, and emotional bonds was already present, but with a distinctive element: an appreciation of beauty in the details of everyday life, in the value of the ordinary as invisible threads that sustain existence.

After three books of poems, he turned to narrative with Novela natural.

“For me, it’s not another literary genre. I don’t see any fundamental difference between thinking about the world through poetry or prose. The search for meaning, for the connections between things, epiphany, melancholy, the rhythm of language: all of this belongs equally to both, regardless of how we write. Novela Natural is very similar to my poems. I prefer to think of my writing as a way of introducing poetry into prose”.

Novels and short stories sprinkled with poetry in prose of short or fragmented paragraphs, like bursts of scenes or images brimming with thought.

“I suppose this comes from poetry. My first book of poems was titled Lapidary and consisted of very short poems. I remember writing some on the backs of bus tickets while traveling.

A short text or fragment is like one of the matches a little girl lights on a freezing winter night: a brief burst of light that scatters the darkness for an instant, before it falls again. It creates a pause that leaves room for the reader’s imagination or memory”.

In her books, memory and recollections construct identity.

“We are made of memory and stories. Memory runs through our bodies at every level, from the DNA in our cells to the accumulated memories we inherit from the books we’ve read. This seems profoundly important to me, and it’s something I constantly return to in my books. Do we exist if we don’t remember anything from our past? Do we even exist once the last person who remembered us as children is gone?”.

So, what is memory?

“A conversation.

An endless conversation with all our bodies and with every human being who has ever lived, from antiquity to the present day. Ultimately, all of the above is a way of seeing time”.

And what is time?

“I don’t have a short answer. That’s why I wrote Time Shelter (International Booker Prize)”.

The Two Faces of Beauty

His novel Physics of Sadness is a clear example of the importance of beauty in everyday life, but above all, an invitation to discover it through empathy.

“I’ve always wondered what it would be like if we could truly enter other people’s stories, if we could connect with them in the deepest way possible. If we could be, at once, the crying child, the laughing woman, a June cloud, a ginkgo tree, a snail, the Minotaur, a fly… That’s why the key phrase in Physics of Sadness is: We are. It is, perhaps, the shortest possible definition of empathy.”

In this novel made of fragments that are both isolated and interconnected, like life itself, Gospodinov connects with wonder and explores the boundaries between reality, memory, imagination, and literature.

“To be honest, I don’t clearly remember how the Minotaur entered my life. I read an edition of ancient Greek myths at some point. I also heard my grandfather’s stories about the traveling fairs he visited as a child, where there were all sorts of wonders: a two-headed boy, and so on.

When I began writing The Physics of Sadness, it was easy for me to imagine meeting the Minotaur-child exhibited at those fairs. I imagined him so vividly that now, sometimes, I think I actually saw him. The image of the Minotaur arose from that feeling of abandonment shared by the children of my generation, alone all day in the small, dark rooms of rented apartments in the city. In a way, we were a Minotaur generation.”

Gospodinov also doesn’t forget the other side of beauty: the loss of a loved one and the pain that comes with it. His novel Gardener and The Death reconstructs the time he spent with his ailing father before he died. His story raises the question of whether the pain of losing a loved one is a genuine feeling because that person is gone, or if it’s more of an act of selfishness because it causes us suffering.

“It’s both, of course, but that doesn’t make it any easier. That’s what I talk about in that novel. Grief for those we’ve lost grows and sprouts new leaves with the passing years. I still have my father’s and mother’s phone numbers saved on my cell phone. I still want to call them, usually at night. Every event, good or bad, yearns to be shared with them. We feel diminished and abandoned, but that’s also part of the grieving process.

In the context of this book, love can be a garden you cultivate for those you love. To love is also to take the hand of a father or mother who leaves this world before your eyes. It’s to stay by their side until the very end.”

Curiosity, Populism, and the Far Right

Curiosity is another driving force in his books, propelling his characters and the story forward. But there’s a suspicion that people are beginning to lose their capacity for curiosity and wonder, as Alberto Manguel, among others, has warned.

“The world has suddenly become filled with answers, most of them banal or false. We find them every time we open our phones or laptops. This diminishes our ability to ask questions, both of the world and of ourselves. And once that happens, curiosity begins to wither. As we know, questioning and curiosity are the beginning not only of philosophy but of all genuine human communication.

I have enormous admiration for Alberto Manguel and have been fortunate enough to meet him personally. He is one of those exceptional people with whom you can talk about literature in the most natural and engaging way, traveling the world with him as if it were a library or a labyrinth, discovering that wonder sometimes lies dormant in the obvious things we have stopped seeing.”

But while reality shows that, in this pursuit of beauty, a world emerges where crude, contemptuous, and brutal forms tend to prevail, some politicians point to values such as kindness, solidarity, empathy, and fraternity as something negative, characteristic of weak people.

“That’s true, but this only demonstrates how, in reality, these people recognize the power of empathy, how much of an obstacle it poses to them, and how determined they are to eliminate it. That’s why we must defend the limits of humanity.

Propaganda doesn’t understand empathy, nor does it know what to do with it. Wherever compassion exists, the machinery of division, polarization, and incitement against others begins to falter.

“It’s sad to see how easily the virus of populism attacks Europe’s immune system. Europe, after all it has been through, should possess a much stronger immunity.

To some extent, this is also a matter of memory, or rather, a collective amnesia that serves the interests of the far right.” To paraphrase Goya, the lethargy of societies breeds dictators.

To avoid ending on an overly pessimistic note, I would add that in the last two years, it’s also clear that societies in different parts of the continent are beginning to awaken.

Georgi Gospodinov could ask for silence by putting a finger to his lips, as his grandmother did when he wanted to tell her about a nightmare, and tell her that “terrifying dreams should never be told, because otherwise they come to life. Or, as she used to say, ‘they become bloody.” And he exorcised his monsters by writing. He continues to do so, transforming fear into memory, memory into empathy, and empathy into a form of resistance against oblivion and a way to enter the lives of others, to remember those moments of everyday beauty that we don’t see.

Georgi Gospodinov: Gardener and The Death / The Physics of Sadness (Impedimenta).

—Winston Manrique Sabogal (with translation assistance from Robert Lienhard).