Humanities Festival  (Georgi Gospodinov – Time shelter: The Exhilarating Poison of the Past) (60 min)

What happens when people and societies are denied a sense of the future? How have politicians selling memories of a Utopian past become so successful in recent times? And where might the weaponization of nostalgia lead us? With great wit and insight, the International Booker Prize 2023 winner GEORGI GOSPODINOV in his latest novel, Time Shelter, creates an absurd world where the past can cure the future by invading it. In conversation with IWM Permanent Fellow IVAN KRASTEV, he will explore the threads and threats that link reality to fiction.