The first thing to ask is: why has so little Georgian literature been translated into English? It is one of the world's oldest languages, dating from around 430, with a rich diversity of medieval scripts, biblical tales, mythology and folklore.

The Caucasus, with its densely forested conical peaks, appearing as if wrapped in green felt during the summer, and often snow-capped the rest of the year, has long been the stomping ground of the horsemen of the steppe - bandits, smugglers, story-tellers and poets.

On the coast of the Black Sea, Alexander the Great fixed the gates beyond which was said to lie “the ends of all the earth”. Zeus punished Prometheus by shackling him to one of the precipices of Georgia's Mount Kazbegi (its Russian name; it is “Mount Ice-peak” in Georgian).

Jason and the Argonauts landed on the coast and were said to have recovered the Golden Fleece beside the mountain rivers of Svaneti in the western Caucasus, having first slayed a dragon and been somewhat distracted by a dark-haired maid - Medea - in Colchis.

Yet for the Western world, Georgia existed on the faultline between Europe and Asia, in an unfathomable maelstrom of Christianity, Islam and the Orthodox Church. Few made an effort to find out more.

Georgia's golden age dates from the 10th to the early 13th century, after the Byzantine Empire and before the Mongol invasion. It was towards the end of this period that Shota Rustaveli wrote what to this day remains the country's most cherished verse, The Man [or Knight] in the Panther's Skin. This epic romance was first translated into English prose by Marjory Wardrop at the beginning of the last century, and given a fresh translation in The Georgian Chronicle (1991) by Kathleen Vivian. David Marshall Lang has produced fascinating extracts from the lives of the Georgian saints, while Donald Rayfield's The Literature of Georgia: A History (2000) remains a definitive text not least because a good 20 per cent of his book is made up of translated extracts, including poems by Vazha Pshavela (whose work is long overdue a full English translation) and the celebrated Tabidze cousins, Galaktion and Titsian.

The Russian annexation of the Caucasus, which began under Peter I in 1722, led to the expansion of its empire over the mountains into Georgia in 1801. One of the great Georgian writers of this time, Ilia Chavchavadze, was also translated by Wardrop; his Notes of a Journey from Vladikavkav to Tiflis (1837), written when he was a young man, remains a manifesto for Georgia. The author muses on his homeland, its people and its language when returning from a four-year absence: the result is light, witty and poetic with proverbs and patriotism. But the fascination also came from the other side of the Caucasus as many of the writers of the day were enchanted by Georgia's astonishing beauty and its vibrant blend of Persian culture and Christian religion.

“I was travelling post from Tiflis. All the luggage in my small springless carriage consisted of one valise stuffed half-full of notes on my travels in Georgia ... My Ossetian driver urged the horses on unceasingly in order that we might get to the top of Mount Koyshaur before nightfall.” So begins Mikhail Lermontov's novel A Hero of Our Time (1840) - as if wilfully reversing Chavchavadze's journey - in a 1958 translation by Vladimir and Dmitri Nabokov, including a customarily sardonic foreword and notes by the former. Moscow-born Lermontov had been sent to the Caucasus in 1837 for an angry poem accusing a court clique of pushing his mentor, Pushkin, toward his fateful duel. Lermontov's hero, Pechorin, is derisive of tsarist society.

Leo Tolstoy spent time as a young writer in Tbilisi, and then four years in the Caucasus, in the Russian Army, later basing his short story, Hadji Murad (in the collection Tales of the Caucasus) on a mountain war-rior he had encountered there.

Alexander Dumas produced his own Tales of the Caucasus, while Maxim Gorky avowed: “The majesty of its mountains; the romantic temperament of its people were the two factors transforming me from a tramp into a man of letters”.

Boris Pasternak described Georgia as “my second motherland” and his Letters to Georgian Friends include those to Titsian Tabidze (1895-1937), a poet and member of the Blue Horn symbolist group who died during Stalin's purge.

Much more recently, one of the greatest living novelists, Andrei Bitov, wrote The Captive of the Caucasus (its title a nod to Pushkin's 1822 book A Prisoner of the Caucasus), published in 1992. One of its sections is “Choosing a Location”, his thoroughly engrossing paen to Georgia. Such is Bitov's love for the country, which he expresses in brilliantly perceptive prose (he is also the best novelist I have read on nature), that this part of the book was suppressed in his native Soviet Union.

There is also a fair number of books about Georgia by adventurous expats. Peter Nasmyth has written Walking in the Caucasus, Georgia (2006), which has detailed sections on the flora and fauna of this beautiful country; and Georgia: In the Mountains of Poetry (2001), which outlines the literary history of the area while offering an abundance of personal anecdotes. In true English manner, Tony Anderson takes two Victorian travellers in the Caucasus (who scrambled up and down the peaks in their London tails) as his tour guides in Bread and Ashes (2003).

Wendell Steavenson, an American journalist, writes of the demise of the Soviet Republic of Georgia in her snappy vignettes comprising Stories I Stole: A Journey to Georgia (2002). Neal Ascherson's Black Sea (1996), meanwhile, is a thoughtful travelogue, shrewdly merging personal observations with the historical, geographical and religious context of this area of many languages and ethnicities.

As Ascherson wrote in a later article, “Georgia may be Orthodox but its true religion is hospitality”. The Georgian tradition of long tables laden with food and wine to which all are invited, followed by toasts and singing and dancing, is explored in Darra Goldstein's The Georgian Feast (1993) with details from paintings by the great late-19th, early 20th-century Georgian painter Niko Pirosmani.

Meanwhile, the heavyweight travel writers Paul Theroux (Ghost Train to the Eastern Star) and Colin Thubron (Among the Russians) have also passed their toes through the portals of Georgia.

It now behoves British publishers to invite more Georgian writers to the table. Perhaps starting with the contemporary writers Dato Turashvili and Aka Morchiladze. Or to publish more by writers whose work occasionally slipped into English during the Soviet regime: Mikheil Javakhishvili, Konstantine Gamsakhurdia. There is also a need for a collected works of the wonderful Illia Chavchavadze. And then there is Giwi Margwelaschwili, now 80 and living in Berlin, whose extraordinary life story of labour camps and constant migration, the story of 20th-century Europe, is reflected in his novel, available in German, Captain Wakusch (1991). So please raise a glass of chacha (Georgian grappa), toast a culture we have hitherto neglected, and then go and find out more.

James Hopkin is the author of the novel Winter Under Water (Picador, £7.99) and the stories Even the Crows Say Krakow (Picador, £1.99)

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