Georgi Gospodinov

Georgi Gospodinov is a Bulgarian writer and one of the most prominent European authors of our time. At Crossing Border, he will be interviewed about his latest novel Death and the Gardener.

My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.

A man sits by his father's bedside and reports radically and gently until a final winter morning.

His father was one of that generation of tragic smokers born right after World War II in Bulgaria, who clung to the snorkels of their cigarettes. A rebel without a cause, he knew how to fail with heroic self-deprecation.

The garden he created out of a barren village yard first saved him, then killed him. It remains his living legacy: peonies and potatoes, roses and cherry trees - and endless stories.

But without him, his son's past, with all its afternoons, began to quietly crack. Because the end of our fathers is the end of a world.