Zaza Koshkadze
Zaza Koshkadze (real name Levan Tsertsvadze) was born in 1982 and graduated in Georgian folk music from the Institute of Traditional and Contemporary Art in Tbilisi. He co-founded the “Net Of Alternative Poetry”, and later “Pink Bus” with other young poets and artists, creating unusual encounters between poetry and (sometimes unwitting) audiences. The Pink Bus anthology published in 2007 became a bestseller. In 2009, he made a “trash movie” about Georgian poetesses. Koshkadze is currently preparing to publish a collection of his poetry, which has long been rejected by publishing houses for being “too provocative”. Furthermore, he has translated Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Charles Bukowski’s poems into Georgian. Zaza Koshkadze has just finished his first novel, which will be published later in 2011 and will also be the first original horror novel to be published in Georgia. He also created the first Georgian horror and sci-fi website http://monstruation.com/. The idea is for it to be a virtual workshop for crafting the genres and also aims to get Georgian-Caucasian legends and myths more popular and thereby inspire contemporary writers and directors. Moreover, since 2011, the author has his own section, "koshka trip", in the magazine PEACETIME, featuring stories about trips he made, people he met and everything else that seems interesting to him.
News
Word Express writer Ognjen Spahić from Montenegro will be visiting London for events with his UK publisher, Istros Books, from the 15th - 18th of May. See the Istros Books website for more details.
This year's Prague Book Fair - Svet Knihy - is focusing on literature the Black Sea region. Word Express writers Ivan Hristov (Bulgaria), Zaza Koshkadze (Georgia) and Pelin Özer (Turkey) will talk about their Balkan literary journey and read their work at the gala evening. Go to the Literature Across Frontiers website for more details.
Word Express interviews Georgian poet Zaza Koshkadze, and talks to Owen Martell and Milan Dobricic about translating and publishing Owen's novel into Serbian after meeting on the Word Express journey. All on the Travel Blog.