Dato Turashvili

Dato Turashvili is a Georgian novelist, playwright, and screenwriter whose fiction often returns to history, freedom, and the pressures placed on individual choice. Born in Tbilisi in 1966, he studied literature, film, and art history and took part in the student movement of the late Soviet period. Flight from the USSR fictionalizes a tragic 1983 attempt by a group of young Georgians to hijack an aircraft and leave the Soviet Union. Rather than reducing them to public labels, the novel considers their motives, relationships, and longing for another life. The story became widely known in Georgia through Turashvili's stage version, Jeans Generation, and has appeared in numerous languages. The 2015 Mosaic Press edition credits Maya Kiasashvili as translator, giving Anglophone readers access to a work closely tied to modern Georgian memory.