This year, She Who Remains – a short novel by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel – was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. The book was highlighted as one of the “Must-Read Books” on Dua Lipa’s book club Service 95, and literary critic Jack Edwards chose it as his “personal winner, in fact, a new favourite book of all time.” Dark, lyrical and spellbinding, it is a previously untold story from the depths of The Accursed Mountains in northern Albania – a modern fever dream of identity, longing and destiny.

The International Booker Prize 

“I thought I knew everything about Albania, but it took a Bulgarian writer, a Bulgarian translator, a small British independent publisher and an international prize for me to find this story.”  – Dua Lipa 

The prize, awarded annually, celebrates the best works of fiction translated into English and published in the UK. Judges consider hundreds of eligible novels, narrowing the field to a longlist of 13, a shortlist of 6, and finally one winning title.

Following Georgi Gospodinov’s win for Time Shelter in 2023, this is the second time a Bulgarian author has been shortlisted – a remarkable feat, given that no other Eastern European writer, bar Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, has featured on the shortlist in the last ten years. Both novels are experimental in style and venture into previously unexplored subject matter. As translator Angela Rodel explains:

“I find Bulgarian novels so interesting because they really don’t follow any kind of a mold. I think people are willing to take chances more than a long-established literature that has a very heavy canon, that sort of puts you in certain genre expectations… I think Bulgarians have always been very interested in how many different ways you can tell classic human stories.”

I attended a fascinating discussion with author Rene Karabash and translator Izidora Angel at Hatchards, Piccadilly, on the evening before the winners were announced. 

On gender 

“I wanted to tell the story of a girl who wanted to be her daddy’s boy, because my grandfather always wanted to have grandsons, but he has two granddaughters. And that was maybe the main point from which I started.

And I wanted to explore that inner female and male energy and how it reflects on the body, how it transforms the body, which is a very interesting topic for me.” – Rene Karabash

She Who Remains explores gender identity through the looking glass of an archaic society. Bekija renounces her womanhood to live as a man through a sacred ritual, becoming a sworn virgin to escape an arranged marriage she will not survive. The decision curses her bloodline and sets off a chain of brutal consequences for herself and her family.

Narratives around gender identity have such strong roots in western literature, yet translating foreign fiction reveals societal norms and traditions we have never encountered before. Bekija’s transformation is not so much physical as it is spiritual – in this world, female identity is so bound to the roles of bride and mother that becoming a man requires an oath of celibacy. To renounce sex is to renounce womanhood entirely.

On the patriarchy 

“I thought Rene’s book was very, it’s very modern, but at the same time, it’s very ahistorical because when you first start, you don’t quite know when it’s taking place. In fact, I think that there’s some jarring things that pull you into the fact that it’s taking place in present day. But I think the phenomenon of women having to act as men in order to be accepted is thousands of years old. We see it today, too.” – Izidora Angel 

The only way for Bekija to survive is to become a man. In a society that strictly polices gender, she takes an extreme measure to claim control over her own life and body – a survival mechanism that echoes across cultures and centuries. We see it in the ancient Chinese legend of Mulan, who disguises herself as a man to protect her family. The method changes; the necessity does not.

 

On the language 

“The Bulgarian language system is so different from English – different alphabets, different moods, different tenses. You have a gendered language where nouns are gendered, and you lose all of that in English. You have a shorthand in Bulgarian that you need more words in English to convey the same thing. So, there’s a real potency to the Bulgarian, a real richness, grammatical and otherwise, that doesn’t necessarily translate to English.” – Izidora Angel

She Who Remains is written mostly in stream of consciousness – beautiful, disorientating and gut-wrenching. Ancient folklore is interwoven with the deeply personal to create a portrait of a character on the boundary of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a man. That Izidora Angel’s translation preserves its poetic intensity is a feat in itself.

She Who Remains addresses gender, queerness and patriarchy through the lens of a community that has never before had a voice. It is a story rooted in the ancient and alive in the present – potent, haunting, and a masterclass in what translated fiction can open up for us.