Paata Shamugia, one of Georgia’s most renowned poets, has been actively speaking out in support of the massive anti-government protests that Georgian civil society has been organising continuously for more than six hundred days. Slovak poet and writer Michal Tallo will speak with him about poetry, hope, and the role of artists and poets in a country where democracy is fighting for survival.

Paata Shamugia is a poet, an essayist, and a prominent voice in contemporary Georgian literature. He came to wider public attention with his provocative book of poems Anti-Tqaosani (Anti-Panther’s Skin, 2006), in which he engaged in a polemic against one of the most significant works of the Georgian literary canon – the twelfth-century national epic poem The Man in the Panther’s Skin – sparking a heated public debate and calls for his work to be banned. Shamugia’s poetry is characterised by irony, linguistic playfulness, satire, and a critical stance towards both national tradition and the current political situation. He has won the prestigious SABA Georgian National Literature Prize twice, for the collections Daujdómeli (Akathist, 2011) and Šizogadoeba (Schizo-National Poems, 2014). He is the founder and editor of the contemporary art portal demo.ge. He studied philology at Tbilisi State University and served as president of the Georgian PEN Club from 2018 to 2022.

Michal Tallo is a Slovak writer and translator. He published three collections of poetry before making his prose debut in 2024 with Všetko je v poriadku, všade je láska (Everything Is Fine, Love Is Everywhere), which won the Tatra Bank Foundation Award for the Arts. Translations of his works have been published in German, Ukrainian, and Czech. He also edited the poetry anthology Junge Lyrik aus der Slowakei (Young Poetry from Slovakia, 2025) for the German publishing house Danube Books. He regularly hosts readings and discussions about contemporary literature or film. From 2023 to 2026 he hosted the radio programme Ars litera on Rádio Devín, and since 2026 he has been producing the podcast Kult knihy (Cult of the Book) together with Anna Siedykh. He has also translated several books by Andrew McMillan and Seán Hewitt into Slovak.