Sunjae Sharmah
Writes historical fiction grounded in real events, drawn to the moments history usually compresses into a single footnote.
Georg Franz Kolschitzky began as a question — how does a besieged city end up known for its coffee? — and grew into a five-year excavation of the 1683 Siege of Vienna, including research trips to Austria supported by letters of recommendation from the Director of the Austrian Cultural Forum at the Austrian Embassy, New Delhi, that opened doors into the country's universities, war museums, and cartographic institutions.
Why Kolschitzky?
Most retellings of the 1683 Siege of Vienna focus on the generals — Sobieski, Starhemberg, Kara Mustafa. Kolschitzky is usually a footnote: the spy who supposedly brought coffee to the West. That footnote is where this book started.
A ruined trader, useful precisely because he had nothing left to lose, moving between two armies that would each kill him for the wrong word — that's not a footnote. That's the kind of person history quietly depends on and then almost entirely forgets.
This novel is an attempt to give him back his weight.
The Project
Georg Franz Kolschitzky is Book I of the Coffee Chronicles — an evolving historical-fiction series. Book II, The Coffee Sniffers, already has a completed first draft. The project exists because one book was never going to be enough to hold coffee's five-century journey.
The Idea
Coffee is not merely a beverage. It is bound up with people, trade, conflict, empire, travel, culture, politics, and human ambition — often in the same cup. Each Coffee Chronicles novel follows one thread of that larger fabric, anchored in a real place at a real moment of change.
The Coffee Chronicles Series
Five centuries, one extraordinary journey — from coffee's earliest origins through the Ottoman world, into Europe, and out across the globe. Book I is set in Vienna, 1683. Book II continues the story. More books will follow as the series develops.