Leo Vardiashvili Maya Jaggi

Novelist Leo Vardiashvili talks about war, fiction and memory and his much anticipated debut novel Hard By a Great Forest.

‘Our mother stayed so we could escape,’ says the narrator of Hard By a Great Forest, about a family torn apart by war. In the aftermath of Georgia’s 2008 war with Russia – when the breakaway region of South Ossetia is occupied by Russian troops – a father goes missing. As his son follows him from London to a decaying yet beautiful Georgian capital, Tbilisi, and a family attempts to put the past to rest, memories lie in wait like land mines. The novel was sparked in part by a 2015 news story about a flood that led to zoo animals, including a hippo, wandering the streets of Tbilisi.
Vardiashvili was born in Tbilisi and scarcely spoke English when he arrived in Britain as a refugee of civil war in Georgia aged 12. His English-language novel sparked a publishers’ bidding war and, out in January, was one the most anticipated débuts of 2024. It has been sold into 16 languages – including Georgian.

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.