Paata Shamugia: The Knight in the Panther's Skin

‘I’ve always wanted to write bad poems, but it demands such titanic work; I’m forced to write only the masterpieces.’ To the poet, the hardest task is to write bad poetry. Born in 1983 in Abkhazia, Paata Shamugia currently lives in Tbilisi and is a distinguished personality in Georgian poetry. The author became known to a wide circle of readers thanks to his book Anti-Tqaosani (a wordplay on the famous Georgian medieval epic The Knight in Panther’s Skin). The book provoked much controversy and was widely discussed in Georgian press and television for several months, as it was boldly taking issue with the country’s most prominent literary text. In 2011, Shamugia’s poetry collection Akathistos received the Saba literary award. The writer is interested in web development, writes articles and is a prominent literary interviewer. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the contemporary art portal demo.ge. In 2014, the publishing house Intelekti published another of his challenging collections, Schizosociety, which won another Saba award and thus made Paata Shamugia the first contemporary poet in Georgia to win this prestigious award twice in the same category.