Interview with Giorgi Muzashvili, Cover Design Competition Winner 2017

Meet Giorgi. He's a 16-year-old Georgian who lives with his parents and brother near Gori, a town in the centre of Georgia famous for being the birth town of Russian dictator Josef Stalin.

Giorgi is a self-confessed bookworm and one of his passions is designing covers for the books he's read. He adores the vampire genre and has also written his own fantasy book 'The Bloody Element' jointly with friend Giorgi Toria. They hope to get it published when they're both old enough to hold the legal rights. And he's a BIG fan of the Blood Omen Saga...

Giorgi Muzashvili with Blood Omen author, Katie Ruth Davies, in Gori

Why vampires?

Because I think that humans are always trying to create the perfect creature without any weakness, so they created vampires. Vampires have all the things that humans always wanted and needed: power, speed, a keen ear, acute eyesight, etc.

Tell us about Blood Omen

I just adore this saga. I'm a massive fan of the vampire genre, so I've read a lot of vampire books, but this one is something amazing. The first reason is obvious and stated in the preface of the book: that there are no happy endings, the "happy ending" being a very bad tendency of 21st century literature. And the characters... the characters are amazing. I fell in love with a fiction character for the very first time- I adore Mica! And then there's the plot- you can never guess what will happen. You can't put the book down when you're reading, even if it's 2am and the next day is a school day! The Blood Omen saga is the PERFECT mix of fantasy and mythology with elements of thriller.

The author lives in Georgia. Have you met her?

I've had the honour to meet her three times already. I feel very lucky because when I discovered Blood Omen for the first time (in July 2014), I never dreamed I'd actually get to meet the author! I met her for the first time in 2015 at a presentation of Blood Omen in Gori, then again in 2016 when I won a prize for the short movie competition she'd run and most recently in November 2016 at the presentation of Blood Omen 3.

What is it like having an foreign YA author living in your country?

It's the coolest thing a reader can get in a country as small as Georgia is. Especially because we've not got a [local] writer that's even used a vampire character in a book. Katie often does presentations and other things, a great way to make literature more popular with teenagers.

Tell us more about teen fiction in Georgia

If we compare the situation to that in western countries, we'll see there is a seriously low number of teens reading books. But it was worse in the past. When I started reading YA books, there was a social resistance that impeded the YA genre from becoming popular. For example, there was a time when Potterheads were labelled Satanists, non-Christians and other foolish things. But now it's changed a lot: you can see how teens are waiting for their favourite books to be published. I'm really glad that it's happening now, but I hope the publishing industry will soon become more like it is in the US and Europe.

Tell us about your book

The Bloody Element - future Bestseller!

The Bloody Element is a fantasy novel. There is a vampire universe which is divided into four covens: Water, Fire, Earth and Air. So the vampires are four kinds: each of them can control one element. It is a gift which Aramonstat (the 'pharaoh') gave them along with a curse. A long time ago, Fire became dominant in the vampire universe. But now the other three covens, Water, Earth and Air, have created an alliance againt Fire which peacekeeps in the supernatural wolrd. The book is a mixture of dark-fantasy, Egyptian mythology and religious allegories. The novel was submitted chapter-by-chapter over two years in an online Vampire fan group, so we already know readers like it. I hope it will win the Palitra (Georgian publishing house) competition and we'll get to see the book printed.

What inspired you for the winning design for the Blood Omen 4 book cover (Georgian version)?

Reading. When the competition was announced, I re-read the previous three books (Blood Omen 1, 2, 3, Georgian versions). When I got to book 2, Dea and Stuart's last dream meeting, I got a few ideas. One was Dea, the moon and snake.

The full Georgian set (so far), with Giorgi's winning design

The first draft of the winning book cover

What are your future plans?

I want to go to Illauni University to study Literary Critique but I'll also be working in Graphic Design.