site.btaWriter Georgi Gospodinov to BTA: Books and Readers Go Through Crises and Endure

"We are more enduring than the crises that happen to us; books and readers stay and make their way through crises. What does not kill them should make them stronger, to paraphrase, or rather quote, Nietzsche," writer and International Booker Prize winner Georgi Gospodinov told the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He met with his readers on Sunday as part of the Spring Book Fair held in front of the National Palace of Culture (NDK).

"The Spring Book Fair is something that started a few years ago. More and more people attend it because they realize how important it is to their lives. The most wonderful thing is when people come to buy books for their children. Over the years, there have always been young families with small children who ask me to sign books for them. The children still cannot read, but this is the beginning of their library," Gospodinov said.

He added that those “who think about their children’s future as readers, as people who read, and who are building libraries for them from an early age, provide the greatest source of optimism today.”

“The world is becoming increasingly difficult to understand, and it is perfectly natural to seek a book, a tool for understanding the world and oneself, for reading the world and oneself. When we read a book, we also read the world and ourselves. A book is simply a path and a channel through which we try to understand everything around us,” explained Gospodinov.

According to him, “literature has always been a source of meaning, empathy, and memory - three things that are in acute shortage today. And I think that is enough. I could list a hundred more things that literature can do, and I have done so before, but these three sources are important.”

Asked by BTA whether people continue to be the focus of his message, Georgi Gospodinov replied: “They still are, yes. They still are. In fact, a book does not exist until it is opened. It is merely an object on a library shelf. When you open it, everything inside comes to life. This year, I am here to present “The Cherry of a People”, a poetry collection that has just turned 30 years old and was published during very dark times, during the great cold winter of 1996. Now, as it is being republished 30 years later, things are just as troubling.”