Lasha Bugadze is a fiction and nonfiction writer and a playwright. He also hosts book programs on Georgian TV. Born in 1977, he lives and works in Tbilisi. His novel A Small Country (2017), won the SABA, Ilia State University Award and Litera prizes for best novel of the year in 2018. Lasha's earlier novel The Literature Express (2009), published in English translation by Dalkey Archive Press in 2013, casts a playful eye over Georgia's yearnings to join the EU and the predicament of writers from small countries with unique languages. Lasha won the International BBC Playwriting Competition in 2011 for the play The Navigator, and his play The President Has Come to See You was performed at London's Royal Court Theatre in 2013.