Zaza Koshkadze


Zaza Koshkadze was born in 1982 and graduated from the Institute of Traditional and Contemporary Art in Tbilisi, majoring in Georgian folk music. With his fellow young poets he co-founded the Net Of Alternative Poetry, and later the Pink Bus. He translated Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Chuck Palahniuk, Rog Phillips, Stephen King, Richard Laymon and other contemporary writers. His short story Me, My Grandma, Grand Grandma and Aliens was included in the anthology 15 Best Georgian Stories in 2012. Koshkadze's poems have been translated into six languages.

Reception

Although I write as someone with little or no knowledge of Georgian literature, it is impossible to keep a good poet down, and Zaza Koshkadze’s verse leaps off the page as coming from a place where night creatures stalk the ill-lit streets, where bodies shiver ecstatic between dirty sheets, where the winners are dissatisfied and sweating and the losers are dead, where urban dreams shrivel at the faintest hint of daylight, and deliverance trades a hard bargain with despair. Zaza is a writer to watch, and his poems celebrate life and berate it, the ghosts of Kerouac and Bukowski breathing down his neck, a brave new world to conquer.
-Richard Gwyn, author of The Colour Of A Dog Running Away.