Georgi Gospodinov wins award from the Spanish Association of Literary Critics

Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov has been named a laureate of the 2025 National Critics’ Prize, awarded by the Spanish Association of Literary Critics, one of the most prestigious awards in the literary world of Spanish-speaking countries.

The novel “Death and the Gardener” by Gospodinov has won the Spanish Critics Award for Best Foreign Book, originally published by Janet 45 in 2024.

“This book doesn’t have any genre, it must invent its own. Just as death has no genre. Or life. Or a garden. An elegiac novel, a garden novel, memoirs, or a memoir-novel. Does it matter to the botany of sorrow? It tells the story of parents who are dying, set in a fading world. It reflects on tragic smokers who are frequently absent, addicted to cigarettes like a lifeline, drifting through different waters and clouds,” Gospoidinov wrote about his novel.

The book was published in Spanish in 2025 by Impedimenta, one of the country’s most prominent independent publishers, founded by Enrique Redel in Madrid in 2007.

“Today we celebrate news that fills us with joy: Georgi Gospodinov has been awarded the 2025 Critics Prize for ‘Death and the Gardener.’ This distinction recognizes one of the most unique, insightful, and indispensable writers of our time. His literature — delicate and deeply humane — explores memory, the passage of time, and the fragility of existence. In his pages, the intimate becomes universal, nostalgia takes on new forms, and everyday life reveals unexpected depth,” wrote the Bulgarian News Agency.

In Ukraine, the novel was published in 2025 by the Black Sheep publishing. It was translated from Bulgarian into Ukrainian by the poet, translator, and literary scholar Ostap Slyvynsky, and the cover art was created by designer Anna Stiopina.

Georgi Gospodinov is a Bulgarian postmodernist writer, literary scholar, playwright, critic, and professor, and the winner of the Booker Prize and other literary awards. He is one of Bulgaria’s most renowned contemporary authors.

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Photo: Georgi Gospodinov’s Facebook page

Images: book covers (Bulgaria, Spain, Ukraine)

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