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).   

Residencies & Fellowships 

➤ NES Artist Residency, Skagaströnd, Iceland—September 2026

➤ Villa Kivi Writers’ Residency. Helsinki, Finland—December 2026 

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 American Psychoanalytical Association (APA).

➤ 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)

➤ Trollope, Eliot, Dickens and Hardy: Reading Victorian Fiction – University of Oxford, Department for Continuing Education (April 23–July 4, 2025)

➤ Jane Austen – University of Oxford, Department for Continuing Education (May 7–July 18, 2025)

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 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 aims to reflect 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. 

Formally, 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 Hélène 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.

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. I can only hope that this background lends my writing a cadence that is more archaic, rhythmic, incantatory—qualities that resist linear chronology and rationalism often demanded of contemporary prose.