In 2018, the author was awarded the LITERA prize for her collection 37 (in the category best Poetry collection of the year).

 

We will find only precise and true metaphors in her work, you won’t come across last-minute improvised images and phrases. You can never mistake her voice for anyone else’s. Lela Samniashvili can be very sharp and very refined, her poems often take a well-defined position, and quite often deal with social and political topics of our times. Sometimes she can almost be too cold: she doesn’t lay herself bare, as other poets do, her images are new, we don’t find clichés, and she only uses a cliché in order to  deconstruct it. In some poems Lela seems to have placed a delayed-action bomb, and she quietly and convincingly arranges for it to explode. The structure and graphics of her poems are peculiar. Tiny little bridges of dashes might remind you of Dickinson or Tsvetaeva. The formal side of the poems is another matter: sounds, musicality, rhythm. 

 

"Lela Samniashvili’s poems are an international poetic language, a sort of poetic Esperanto, in which we are able to speak the poetry of absolutely every country, and understand from start to finish what we’re saying."  (Diana Anthimiadou, poet)