Thread by @joannaelmy

Tonight, #Bulgarians watched the @TheBookerPrizes the way most people watch football – and I don't know if there are many a people who could boast that about literature. Time Shelter, by @Gospodinov68 translated by Angela Rodel @rodel_angela won the award. 1/

The International Booker win is important for #Bulgaria because this is the first time in history that the country has been nominated for any major award. Bulgarians, often described as people on Europe's periphery and a media cliché by this point, long to be noticed. 2/

.@Gospodinov68 has talked about coming to peace with being Bulgarian, about acceptance of one's national origin, because Bulgaria is a country deeply wounded by successive dictatorships and persistent corruption, haunted by its past and ashamed of its present. 3/

The abundance of joy at the nomination and the International Booker win also reveals #Bulgaria's longing to be recognized by the international community not as a dire headline, but as a complex culture with plenty to say about the world. 4/

As a #Bulgarian and an #EasternEuropean in the #West, I have often felt small, invisible. I have heard the word "Balkanization", yet I have heard no generic (derogatory) term to describe the reality of the United States that can be as messy, incomprehensible, and complex. 5/

As a student in Paris, my colleagues (European Studies stream) knew very little about #EasternEurope and even my professors talked about "our half" of the continent only in the context of the #ColdWar and #Communism. I was often asked whether I was there on an exchange. 6/

One couldn't dare to dream that writing in Bulgarian could earn you a place in the world, could matter; we are "a small language" and "a small culture", most people don't know or care who we are, or believe that we may matter internationally. And so we believe it, too. 7/

That's why my generation, the Eastern European "born-frees" who came after the collapse of the USSR, learned "foreign languages" – that almost exclusively meant Western languages. And English. Because English was the way to be somebody. To be heard. To exist in the world. 8/

In most #Bulgarian families, "learning foreign languages" is a family value – it means one can make it somewhere in life, have a better life, change things, have a voice. That an author writing in Bulgarian made it to the world stage is nothing short of surreal to us. 9/

I won't talk much about what life in the world is for someone who doesn't have a US or a Western European passport. I will not delve into the rejections and contempt, regardless of one's qualifications. This is the reality of most people in the world who share these traits. 10/

What I will say is that something amazing is happening in #EasternEuropean literature and out cultural, social space as a whole. #Ukraine shows us this on the democracy front, our writers are getting the recognition they deserve, and our voices are increasingly heard. 11/

Georgi Gospodinov's win is, I hope, only the beginning of a recognition by the literary and cultural Western establishment -- a recognition that needn't always be a pedestal, but just an open door, an open mind, the belief that, yes, "small" nations can matter tremendously. 12/