In “Time Shelter,” a therapist named Gaustine starts a “time clinic,” where patients with Alzheimer’s can, in meticulously decorated rooms, revisit bygone decades when they felt safe — only to see the clinic catch on among healthy people who simply wish to escape their daily lives. The novel explores both how people fantasize about exiting the forward flow of time, and how they seek refuge in their memories — or, more often, their idealized notions of the past.

Gospodinov has cited far-flung political events of 2016, as well as various European countries’ attempts to conduct “referendums on the past,” as the impetus for the novel. “My urge to write this book came from the sense that something had gone awry in the clockworks of time,” he said in an April interview, later adding: “How does one live with a deficit of meaning and future?”

The novelist described in his acceptance speech how, as a child, he tended to check out books from the library that were written in the first person.

“Why? I realized a little later: I did not want the hero to die at the end,” Gospodinov said. “And as long as you’re telling a story, you’re still alive.” And as long as writers tell their stories and the stories of others, he added, they, too, are still alive. “Our stories produce life, and resistance to death and evil.”

Rodel praised what she called Gospodinov’s “many brilliant metaphors,” chiefly “the critical deficit of meaning.” Though it’s a bleak image in the novel, it kept surfacing in her mind during the celebratory gathering of the International Booker nominees. “The shortlisted books are trying to replenish this deficit,” she said.

Prizes often boost book sales, but the International Booker Prize casts an especially bright spotlight. It can grow authors’ Anglophone readership, reengage their domestic audience and encourage publishers to commission versions in other languages. Han Kang’s “The Vegetarian,” for example, had sold around 20,000 copies over its first decade in print in South Korea; after it won the prize in 2016, it had an almost immediate reprint of more than 450,000 copies. Last year’s win for “Tomb of Sand,” by Geetanjali Shree and translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, drew attention to the breadth of literature being written in South Asian languages in India, where English-language literature has long been treated as more prestigious, as well as more commercial.

This year’s panel of judges was chaired by novelist Leïla Slimani, best known for her thriller “The Perfect Nanny,” and included New Yorker staff writer Parul Sehgal, novelist Tan Twan Eng, Financial Times literary editor Frederick Studemann and Ukrainian-language translator Uilleam Blacker. They read more than 130 books before making their selections for the longlist and shortlist.

“Tomorrow is the most important Bulgarian holiday, my favorite national holiday,” Gospodinov noted in his speech. “It is the day of the Cyrillic alphabet, the day of writing and language. It’s wonderful when letters and language are being celebrated.”

The 2023 Booker Prize, recognizing a work of fiction originally written in English, will be awarded in late November. A longlist of around a dozen nominees will be named Aug. 1.

This story has been updated.