Boris Akunin talks to Maya Jaggi

Detective novelist and historian Boris Akunin discusses his writing, his father’s ‘exotic’ ancestry, how Putin made him feel more Georgian, and being a Russian exile during the Ukraine war.

Akunin is one of the most widely read authors in Russia, where his crime novels have sold more than 20 million copies. His Inspector Fandorin mysteries, in homage to Sherlock Holmes, chronicle the tsarist and early-Soviet empires. Akunin is the pen-name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, who was born in Soviet Georgia, grew up in Moscow and lives in exile in London. In 2022, he co-founded True Russia with dancer-choreographer Mikhail Baryshnikov and others. A charity opposed to the Ukraine war, and a diasporic movement for Russian democracy, it supports Ukrainian refugees and Russians fleeing political persecution in Putin’s Russia.

Akunin was born to a Georgian father and Russian mother in Soviet Georgia. His family moved to Moscow when he was two, and he rediscovered his birthplace only in recent years. Akunin published his first detective stories in 1998 and was named Russian Writer of the Year two years later. His books are translated into 30 languages. The Erast Fandorin series ranges from The Winter Queen to Not Saying Goodbye, and includes The Turkish Gambit, Murder on the Leviathan and The Death of Achilles. The Coronation won the AntiBooker prize, and All The World’s A Stage was shortlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize in 2017. His series, The History of the Russian State, combines nine non-fiction titles with nine fictional counterparts. Other works include the Sister Pelagia series, and the Nicholas Fandorin books featuring the famous detective’s grandson.

Here he talks to Maya Jaggi, founding director of the festival’s programme of Georgian literature and culture, who is a contributing art critic for FT. Her award-winning cultural writing has appeared widely, including in The New York Review of Books and The Guardian – where she was a profile writer and fiction critic for a decade. She is chair of the independent jury of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) Literature Prize 2024 and was artistic director of the UK’s first festival of Georgian writers, Where Europe Meets Asia: Georgia25, in 2016, and its online sequel, Georgia’s Fantastic Tavern, at the British Library and Writers’ House in 2021 – both of which she originated.

Part of the festival’s programme of Georgian literature and culture.