Zaza Burchuladze Receives Berlin City Scholarship for Literary Merit

Zaza Burchuladze, a postmodern Georgian novelist and dramatist, has been granted Berlin’s work scholarship for 2020 as a distinguished foreign-language writer. Burchuladze will benefit from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe Scholarship, granted to a mere 10 Berlin-based authors of non-German literature.

In selecting their recipients, organizers seek works that feature "quality, viability and continuity" from authors looking for benefits to their artistic advancement. The scholarship also aims to "keep alive the literary scene of Berlin by promoting innovative texts and their authors".

Born in 1973, Zaza graduated from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts before commencing his route as a novelist and a short prose writer. He has translated numerous Russian contemporary novels and classics, including authors like Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Vladimir Sorokin. Burchuladze’s narratives often startle the audience with his experimental way of writing and the provocative themes he takes up. Burchuladze has won steadily increasing recognition for his inspired writings which, while growing in boldness and penetration, exemplify the eccentricity of being and high qualities of style.

Primarily in recognition of his fruitful, varied and outstanding production in the realm of dramatic art, Burchuladze has been esteemed by many as the most outstanding Georgian writer of contemporary post-Soviet literature. Zaza received last year's Brücke Berlin Literary and Translator Award for bringing the acclaimed novel A Tourist’s Breakfast to the German-speaking audience. The novel follows the protagonist in his wanders around Berlin, playing with obscurity and humor to unearth new aspects of the human psyche. The novel has been praised as a ‘masterpiece’ by Levan Berdzenishvili, a well-known Georgian literary critic.

By Elene Dzebisashvili