Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel have won the International Booker Prize for their novel Time Shelter, a darkly comic work that explores the dangerous appeal of nostalgia. The novel, which imagines a clinic that recreates the past with each floor reproducing a different decade, beat five other finalists to the prize, which recognizes fiction from around the world that has been translated into English.

The prize money of 50,000 pounds ($62,000) is divided between the author and the translator. Time Shelter was written in 2016, the year of Donald Trump’s election and the U.K.’s Brexit referendum, when “anxiety was in the air”, according to Gospodinov. He said he wanted to write a novel about “the weaponization of nostalgia” and how it can be used by populist politics to manipulate people. The novel is also a reflection on Europe, a continent that needs a future and where the past is reinvented, he said.

French novelist Leila Slimani, who chaired the judging panel, praised Time Shelter as “a brilliant novel full of irony and melancholy”. She said it was a profound work that deals with a contemporary and philosophical question: What happens to us when our memories disappear? Gospodinov, 55, is one of Bulgaria’s most-translated authors. Time Shelter has also won Italy’s Strega European Prize for literature in Italian translation.

The International Booker Prize is awarded every year to a translated work of fiction published in the U.K. or Ireland. It is run alongside the Booker Prize for English-language fiction, which will be handed out in the autumn. The prize was set up to boost the profile of fiction in other languages and to salute the underappreciated work of literary translators. Last year’s winners were Indian writer Geetanjali Shree and American translator Daisy Rockwell for Tomb of Sand.

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