Awards & Contests

➤ My essay, “Depression as a Lack of Language,” was selected as one of the winning entries in a global essay contest and published in the book Mind in the Line of Fire: Psychoanalytic Voices to the Challenges of Our Times by the International Psychoanalytic Association (June 26, 2023). 

Fellowships & Grants

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Residencies & Retreats

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Recognitions

➤ Bridport Prize – Poetry (2025) Shortlisted for the second round (top 9%) for the poem “my winter days” in the Bridport Prize, one of the most prestigious and internationally renowned writing competitions.

➤ First Page Journal – Fiction (2025) Longlisted for the opening paragraph of my novel in First Page, a literary journal that publishes only the first paragraphs of fiction, spotlighting compelling narrative openings.

Education 

➤ Diploma of Higher Education in Psychology – University of Essex (March 7, 2025) Accredited by the British Psychological Society (BPS). 

➤ Certificate in Traumatic Stress Studies – Trauma Research Foundation, in partnership with PESI, Inc. (March 20–October 20, 2024) Taught by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., Founder and Medical Director of the Trauma Center.

➤ Certificate of Advanced Study in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy – Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies (September 22, 2022-September 27, 2023) 
Accredited by the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). 

➤ Advanced Creative Writing  – University of Oxford, Department for Continuing Education (June 14–August 23, 2021)

➤ Critical Reading – University of Oxford, Department for Continuing Education (June 16–August 25, 2021) 

I’m a Tbilisi-born, Berlin-based writer published in a range of magazines and literary journals, including The New York Times and World Literature Today. My fiction and nonfiction explore themes at the intersection of psychoanalysis, film and literature—with a particular focus on power, language, desire and the systems that shape subjectivity.

My writing investigates the psychic undercurrents of experience: the limits of language, the mystical and opaque, and that which resists symbolic capture—what cannot be fully contained by narrative or form. I’m drawn to the structural and the unsayable, to the inner and often unconscious forces that shape thought and identity. 

My work reflects a suspicion of capitalist, patriarchal, and linguistic systems that seek to define, reduce, or commodify experience; Instead, I’m interested in contradiction, in excess, in what breaks the frame or exists at the edges of meaning—liminal, paradoxical, non-categorizable spaces beyond binaries and dualities. 

I believe writing should be free of elitist gatekeeping, cultural authoritarianism, and the rigid standards, which reduce literature to an instrument of intellectual or political control.  

Formally, my writing leans toward the lyrical, the experimental, and the nonlinear—what Hélène Cixous called écriture féminine: a writing of the body, affect, and the ungovernable unconscious. I’m compelled by a poetics that bleeds, flickers, slips—a hallucinatory, dreamlike, saturated style that traces rather than explains, reveals rather than resolves, disorients rather than affirms.

I resonate deeply with Cixous’s indictment of literature as a site of patriarchal exclusion. Fiction and writing more broadly have not been neutral spaces. They have dressed up patriarchal structures in beauty, metaphor, and narrative, thereby hiding their violence.  They’ve been sites where women are excluded—and even when present, objectified and silenced. She believes writing has become a mirror for male power to admire itself: “self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory.” Cixous indicts literature for its complicity in reproducing and sanctifying patriarchal monopoly on meaning, even literature that claims to be humane, beautiful, or liberatory. According to Cixous, writing has been hijacked by phallocentrism, by rationality as power, by the idea that only one kind of logic and voice counts. 

However, when women enter the text as full subjects, it shatters old structures. Because she doesn’t fit. 

“Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement. The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural.” Hélène Cixous,The Laugh of the Medusa.

I’m interested in attempting to practice this kind of writing—one that pushes language to its breaking point, not just thematically, but formally and structurally as well.  The writing which avoids mimicking patriarchal codes, escapes categorization and invents new, subversive forms. 

As the experimental writer Kathy Acker notes, “women need to become literary 'criminals,' break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives.” And as Anthony Burgess remarks, “writers are not, by nature, respectable: their function is to be subversive.”

While language today has been colonized by patriarchy and made palatable by capitalism—flattened into clarity, information, and marketable prose—its roots trace back to a radically different ontology. Long before it was institutionalized as symbolic law, language emerged as chant, incantation, invocation: rhythm and sound. Etymology itself reveals this genealogy—words carry echoes of myth, intuition, collective unconscious, and the sounds of nature.

Across mystical traditions—Kabbalah’s letters of creation, Norse runes as carved spells, Gnostic passwords of liberation, Celtic bardic poetry as incantation—language was a force that could heal, curse, bind, or transmute. To write was to impress energy onto the world, to cast a spell. Even in its modern, patriarchal capture, language leaks this archaic power: in poetry, in the uncanny effects of metaphor, in mystical and experimental writing that breaks syntax and opens cracks in the symbolic order.

Language carries this double inheritance—law and spell, colonization and magic—and to write today means to inevitably write from within that tension. For women, being aware of this inheritance is especially important: by using language differently, by bending and breaking its codes, we reclaim the ability to speak on our own terms, rather than within those imposed upon us.  

“Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it’s not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It’s not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to ­impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects ­everything to its needs.” ― Elena Ferrante

Alongside English, I carry the presence of my native language, Georgian—one of the world’s oldest living languages (with written records dating back to the 5th century CE). Its unique alphabet has no relation to Latin, Greek, or Cyrillic, and its metaphors, syntax, and rhythms differ radically from European languages. Its grammar bends thought differently, and its imagery often comes from an ancient, animistic worldview. Even when I write in English, I feel this subterranean Georgian inheritance shaping my prose in ways I cannot always control or name. I can only hope that this background lends my writing a cadence that is more archaic, incantatory—qualities that resist linear chronology and rationalism often demanded of contemporary prose.