AustLit

Igor Gelbach was born during World War II to Russian parents, from Odessa, stationed in Samarkand. After the war the family relocated to Georgia and Gelbach spent a happy childhood in Dioscuria a seaside resort in Georgia, USSR. From the age of 12 to about 17 Gelbach lived with his parents in Riga, Latvia. Here he was exposed to a wide variety of cultures. He was inspired to study the hard sciences by an older friend who gave him Einstein's Theory of Relativity. At Tbilisi University, Georgia, USSR, he had the intellectual freedom of studying "all that stuff about life, death and the universe" and graduated as a physicist.

In the 1960s Gelbach began writing film scripts and, later, plays. The uneasy times of the 1970s in the Soviet Union led him to migrate to Australia with his two sons. His first novel, Confessions of a Clay Man, was written in Australia and published in 2001 in Russia where it was nominated for a literary prize.