Spanish authors to join Georgian counterparts for literature week in Tbilisi
Author and poet Elena Medel will meet Paata Shamugia and the audience at the Writers’ House of Georgia. Photo: Gabriela Cuzepan.
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Award-winning Spanish authors and poets will join their Georgian counterparts in three Tbilisi locations next week to talk all things literature as part of the Spanish and Georgian Literature Week.
Authors of works in prose and poetry, philologists and literary critics are set to host audiences in discussions of their profession, in an event organised by the Georgian National Book Centre and Madrid’s Instituto Cervantes.
Opening at the Writers’ House of Georgia, the week’s first encounter will see Elena Medel, author of essays and poetry collections, joined by Georgian counterpart Paata Shamugia in a talk about nuances and challenges of Georgian and Spanish poetry.
Winner of the XXVI International Poetry Award of the Loewe Foundation and the 2016 Arts and Literature Award of the Princess of Girona Foundation, Medel is also founder and director of a publishing house.
Ana Kordzaia-Samadashvili is an award-winning author and translator. Photo: Georgian National Book Centre.
Shamugia was named a winner of the 2011 Saba Literary Prize for Akathistos, a collection of poems, before he became the first author to win the award for the second time in a same category when judges honoured his collection Schizosociety in 2014.
The following day of the literary week, Book House ‘Ligamus’ will set up a stage for a meeting of novelist Teona Dolenjashvili with philologist and author Patricia Esteban Erles and Basque poet Harkaitz Cano, to talk the prose side of things.
Dolenjashvili published her first book, a short story collection January River, in 2005 and went on to win next year’s Saba Literary Prize for Debut of the Year. She also claimed the 2009 edition of the prize for the novel Memphis.
Erles is a writer for regional daily Heraldo de Aragon and has received a University of Zaragoza prize for her literary work, which has spanned a decade. Cano, an author of collections of prose and poetry, has also worked in scriptwriting and translated literature into the Basque language.
In the third pairing of the week, Nicolas Melini and Ana Kordzaia-Samadashvili will sit down at Stamba’s Books to discuss peculiarities of novel-writing.
Basque author Harkaitz Cano will be in Tbilisi to talk about prose. Photo: harkaitzcano.com.
Director of the Hispano-American Writers Festival, Melini has published in various genres and worked in screenwriting, while Kordzaia-Samadashvili has been awarded the Saba and Iliauni literary prizes as well as the Goethe Institute Prize for her work in literature and translation.
The meetings in Tbilisi will be moderated by authors Shota Iatashvili and Levan Berdzenishvili as well as literary critic Levan Tsagareli.
Beside the authors from the two countries, the week will host Martin Lopez-Vega, Head of Culture Department of Instituto Cervantes, and Javier Valdivieso, the institute’s Director of the Bulgarian Office, in Tbilisi. The Madrid institute is collaborating with organisers of the Georgian National Book Centre for the three-day event.
The week comes ahead of a planned Georgian visit by Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa in September, seen as a continuation of events themed after Spanish-language literature in the country.
The Spanish and Georgian Literature Week will be held in Tbilisi between April 16-18.
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