“The novel our city was waiting for so long.”
——Levan Berdzenishvili, philologist

“In contemporary Georgian fiction The Southern Elephant manages to catch 'Zeitgeist' as perfectly as no other novel can.”
——Zaal Andronikashvili, literary critic

“That’s it! That’s The Southern Elephant – the story of the generation that faced a terrible monster in a dead-end.”
——Ana Kordzaia-Samadashvili, writer

“Phenomenally interesting text. Kikodze wrote subtle and suggestive novel which seems to be incomparable in contemporary Georgian literature.”
——Nikoloz Agladze, literary critic

★The Southern Elephant is one of the best Georgian novels of the 21st century!
★Rights sold in German, Azerbaijanian, Bulgarian, Polish, and Romanian!
★The book won the 2017 IliaUni Writers' House Litera Award for Best Novel of the Year.
★English sample available.

Other titles of the author: Lizard on the Gravestone, Norwegian Diary

The Southern Elephant is one of the best Georgian novels of the 21st century. It has two main characters, the narrator and his friend Tazo, both victims of a school bullying. They both used to dream of becoming film directors but their lives took a wrong turn: after not taking an action to save a child, Tazo becomes a victim of his conscience and turns into an introvert who barely leaves home. Meanwhile, the narrator directs one film that turns to be successful. However, he gives up directing because a fatal accident occurs while shooting another film.

The whole novel is about one day and develops as follows: Tazo asks the narrator to let him stay in his apartment for a day because he wants to bring in his new crush. The narrator agrees, goes out to have a walk and leaves those two in peace. This is a day for looking in the mirror of the past and reappraising his own life, a day in which his childhood, his love, passion, mishaps and tragedies flash past like frames from a film. Against the background of the main hero’s memories recent Georgian history is replayed: it constantly pursues the narrator like a shadow and makes him accept responsibility for what is happening around him. The novel has one other important character, Tbilisi, with its complex relationships, its social obligations, sometimes heavy, sometimes light, sometimes happy and sometimes tragic, but more often than not grotesque. The narrator knows his city only too well, it has brought him a great deal of pain. The narrator’s memories, however, several times go beyond the boundaries of the capital into Mingrelia, Svanetia, or European cities. The novel has one other theme: cinematography. This is a book about two young men who dreamed of becoming film directors and making films in a destroyed country, where cinematography had ceased to exist. One of them (the more talented Tazo) has never managed to fulfil his dream. The other (the narrator) has in fact become a director and made one successful film, but a tragic event happened when shooting the second film and made him permanently hate his art, so that now he films advertisements. Newly established Georgian businessmen, who are the narrator’s customers and whose wealth can be traced back to the blood-soaked 1990s, are yet another thread in the novel. This is a novel about moral dilemmas, about how to stay human.

Thanks to the narrator’s memories a story takes shape of how Tazo was made to deliberately isolate himself. Years earlier stood aside from a conflict between little boys which resulted in the death of one of them. Feelings of remorse have taken away all his vital energy and turned a young lad into an old man. The aggression and ‘bullying’ of young people, the path which two friends took at an early age, is another theme of the novel. The narrator walks the city, which he knows like the back of his hand. The book is geographically very exact. The narrator lives at number 11 Kiacheli Street, next to the house where Lavrenti Beria used to live. This ‘neighbourhood’ takes the narrator to the period of Georgian history when he had only just been born – the roots of violence and aggression, the Soviet heritage, whose evaluation and analysis society has not yet got round to. The infantilism of this society, thanks to which it has to be punished one day! That is something the narrator is convinced of. The novel has a dramatic love story running through it. At one point the narrator lacked the courage to change his way of life and keep hold of a person whom he loved. He failed to understand that this was not just another adventure – ‘Sometimes we spend a whole life learning how to let go. Sometimes letting go becomes a habit and then we let go of the most important thing, unable to grasp that it was the most important…’


The novel is about moral dilemmas and how to remain and survive as a human – yet it doesn’t advise. In the last pages A. Kikodze offers an ‘ugly’ version of a happy end, which makes the whole novel candid and sincere.

Archil Kikodze

Writer, actor, wildlife guide, photographer and birdwatcher, Archil Kikodze stands out as one of the major names of contemporary Georgian literature. He graduated from Tbilisi State University, department of Oriental Studies. Later he mastered the profession of cameraman and screenwriter at Tbilisi State Institute of Theatre and Cinema.

Kikodze started writing in the late 90-ies and for almost twenty years he was actively working on short stories and guidebooks. His first novel The Southern Elephant was published in 2016 and was followed by an immense public success and recognition.

In his literary works A. Kikodze is able to perfectly demonstrate visible and invisible attraction of Georgian people. Dialogues between generations, traveling, looking for answers to questions – those are the main topics that the author covers in his literary works and writings.

The awards:
•His documentary film "Spring in Javakheti" won the 2004 Niamori Festival Award.
•"The Story of a Bird and a Man" won the 2014 Saba prize for the best short story.
•"The Southern Elephant" won the 2017 IliaUni Writers' House Litera Award for Best Novel of the Year.