Guram Odisharia

Odisharia has been awarded the Georgian State Prize, the Ilia Chavchavadze Prize, the Lomisi Publishing House Prize, the Georgian Theater Society Prize, Giorgi Sharvashidze Prize, as well as the Chekhov Gold Medal and the International Association of Journalists Award "Golden Wing", and Alexander Dovzhenk Medal (2016, Ukraine, Kyiv). In 2012, he was voted the "most tolerant person in Georgia" in a survey organized by civil society organizations. In 2017, he was awarded the title of "Defender of Tolerance" by the Council of Religions at the Public Defender's Office.

In the following decades, Odisharia was involved in peace activism and participated in more than 60 Georgian-Abkhazian, Georgian-Ossetian, Caucasian and international conferences and meetings. From 2012 to 2014, was the Minister of Culture and Monument Protection of Georgia. In this capacity, in 2014, he signed a document in Berlin whereby Georgia became the Honorary Guest of the 2018 Frankfurt Book Fair. He is married and has a daughter.

Guram Odisharia's first poems and drawings were published while he was still in school. He is the author of 10 books of poetry. His best-known works are the novels "The Black Sea Ocean" (2000), "Return to Sukhumi" (1995) and "President's Cat" (2007; a novel translated into 15 languages) and a play "The Far Away Sea", staged by the director Temur Chkheidze in Tbilisi in 2005. His works have been translated into English, Russian, Ukrainian, Abkhazian, Turkish, Armenian, Italian and other languages. While living in exile in Tbilisi, he has also published several collections of short stories, articles and 5 novels. His latest novel "Together without you" was published in 2019.

Miriane (Guram) Odisharia (Georgian: მირიანე (გურამ) ოდიშარია; born 24 September 1951) is a Georgian poet, writer, playwright, and public figure. He was won more than ten national and international literary awards. From 2012 to 2014, he served as the Minister of Culture and Monument Protection of Georgia.

Born on 24 September 24, 1951 in Sukhumi, Guram Odisharia graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology of the Abkhazian University in Sukhumi in 1975. At various times he worked as a correspondent for the Sukhumi radio broadcasting, an Abkhazian regional newspaper, as a literary consultant for the Abkhazian Writers' Union, as the editor-in-chief of the Ritsa magazine (1987-1994), and as the director of the Abkhazian branch of the Merani publishing house. His first poem was published in 1969. The war in Abkhazia (1992–1993) displaced him to Tbilisi, Georgia's capital, in a difficult passage through the Sakeni-Chiberi Pass, where hundreds of people died of freezing cold and exhaustion. He later described these days in his work, "The Pass of the Persecuted".