10 Facts About Fazil Iskander

Fazil Abdulovich Iskander was a Soviet and Russian writer and poet known in the former Soviet Union for his descriptions of Caucasian life.

Fazil Iskander authored various stories, including "Zashita Chika", which features a crafty and likeable young boy named "Chik", but is probably best known for the picaresque novel Sandro of Chegem and its sequel The Gospel According to Chegem.

Fazil Abdulovich Iskander was born in 1929 in the cosmopolitan port city of Sukhumi, Georgia to an Iranian father and an Abkhazian mother.

Fazil Iskander's father was deported to Iran in 1938 and sent to a penal camp where he died in 1957.

Fazil Iskander's father was the victim of Joseph Stalin's deportation policies of the national minorities of the Caucasus.

Fazil Iskander distanced himself from the Abkhaz secessionist strivings in the late 1980s and criticised both Georgian and Abkhaz communities of Abkhazia for their ethnic prejudices.

Fazil Iskander warned that Abkhazia could become a new Nagorno-Karabakh.

Later Fazil Iskander resided in Moscow and was a writer for the newspaper Kultura.

Fazil Iskander had been married to a Russian poet Antonina Mikhailovna Khlebnikova since 1960.

Fazil Iskander died in his home on 31 July 2016 in Peredelkino, aged 87.