★English sample available.

Other titles of the author: The Southern Elephant, Norwegian Diary

The main subject of Archil Kikodze’s latest novel, A Lizard on a Grave Stone, is memory. The narrator is endowed with an astounding memory and can recall things that other people try to forget. He constantly tries to recall the past with a woman he loved, by whom he has a child now aged twelve, and who repeatedly refuses to marry him. Memory is like a burden which you have to carry alone, because memory is individual, selective. The narrator refuses to forget his childhood traumas, his adolescent disillusionments, sufferings, and thus makes his own existence almost unbearable.

One of the main themes of the book is a society which has been left deprived of values. It is an epoch when old values are losing their meaning, when there is no replacement by new values, as though the country has been left suspended in the air, a country whose children don’t know where they should head for. The book’s theme is Georgian, but the action takes place all over the world, beginning in Berlin and ending in a little village in the Caucasus.

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.