Naira Gelashvili (born October 28, 1947) is a Georgian

Georgia (country)

Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...

 fiction writer, philologist, Germanist, and civil society activist.

Gelashvili graduated from the Faculty of Western Europe

Western Europe

Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...

an Literature, Tbilisi State University

Tbilisi State University

Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University , better known as Tbilisi State University , is a university established on 8 February 1918 in Tbilisi, Georgia. TSU is the oldest university in the whole Caucasus region...

, in 1970. She has published a series of stories and the novel dedis otakhi (დედის ოთახი; "The Mother’s Room", 1985). She is one of the most ardent followers of European existentialist prose in modern Georgian literature. Gelashvili has also studied folklore

Folklore

Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

 of the Caucasian peoples

Caucasian peoples

This article deals with the various ethnic groups inhabiting the Caucasus region. There are more than50 ethnic groups living in the region.-Peoples speaking Caucasian languages:...

 and heads the cultural NGO The Caucasian House.