Storytelling, Visual Narratives, and Postponing the End: A Conversation with Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel

International Booker Prize-winning Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov and his English translator Yale alumna Angela Rodel discuss the power of storytelling: Can stories really put off the end? Can literature act as a natural antidote to the poison of propaganda? How do visual images inspire and enrich the text within Gospodinov's literary fiction?

The 41 stories in Gospodinov's new anthology The Man with Many Names touch humorously and humanely on the themes of time, memory and empathy that weave through his longer works, from the whimsical Natural Novel, to the fragmentary Physics of Sorrow and the ironically prophetic Time Shelter, as well as the exquisitely intimate Death and the Gardener. This conversation offers insight into the craft of a storyteller the International Booker Prize Jury dubbed “one of the indispensable writers of our times.”

The program is generously supported by the European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, the Whitney Humanities Center, the Yale Translation Initiative, the Yale University Art Gallery’s John Walsh Lecture and Education Fund, and Yale University’s Comparative Literature Department, Creative Writing Program in the Department of English, and the Department of Music’s Friends of Music Fund.