Shushan Avagyan (born 1976) is an Armenian author, translator and Associate professor at the American University of Armenia's College of Humanities and Social Sciences, where she is the coordinator of the Graduate Certificate in Translation Program.
Avagyan has translated into English a volume of Shushanik KurghinianâÂÂs poetry, as well as works by Russian critics Boris Arvatov and Viktor Shklovsky. Her articles and translations have been published in academic journals including: Contemporary Women's Writing, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Asymptote, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2003, she co-founded the Women's Resource Center in Yerevan with Lara Aharonian and Gohar Shahnazaryan.
Avagynan's debut novel, Girq-anvernagir (A Book, Untitled), was published in 2006. The English translation was a winner of the English PEN Translates Award in 2023.
Early life
Avagynan was born in 1976 in Soviet Armenia. As a child, she lived in Zambia and Ethiopia with her parents, who taught there due to the Soviet Teach Abroad Program. After graduating from Khachik Dashtents School in Yerevan, she moved to Cyprus to study at the Melkonian Educational Institute in Nicosia. She received her undergraduate degree in studio art at Cedar Crest College, and her master's and doctoral degrees in English studies from Illinois State University.
Awards
- 2023: English PEN Translates Award for A Book, Untitled
- 2024: MSA Translation Book Prize for A Book, Untitled
Works
Novels
- Girq-anvernagir, samizdat, 2006 (A Book, Untitled, Awst Press, 2023; trans. Deanna Cachoian-Schanz) (Libro senza nome, Utopia, 2024; trans. Minas Lourian). (Eastern Armenian); (English); (Italian).
- Queered: WhatâÂÂs to be done with Xcentric art? (co-author), the Queering Yerevan (QY) Collective, 2011
- Zarubyani Kanayq (with Lusine Talalyan), samizdat, 2014.
- Violent Phenomena: 21 essays on Translation, Titled Axis Press, 2021.
Translations
- Shushanik Kurghinian, I want to live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian, Armenian International Women's Association, 2005.
- Viktor Shklovsky, Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, Dalkey Archive Press, 2007.
- Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Dust (with Evgeny Pavlov, Thomas Epstein and Ana Lucic): Dalkey Archive Press, 2009.
- Viktor Shklovsky, Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar, Dalkey Archive Press, 2011.
- Viktor Shklovsky, A Hunt for Optimism, Dalkey Archive Press, 2013.
- Viktor Shklovsky, The Hamburg Score, Dalkey Archive Press, 2017.
- Boris Arvatov, Art and Production, Pluto Press, 2017.
- Hovhannes Tumanyan, Quatrains, 2019.
- Viktor Shklovsky, On the Theory of Prose, Dalkey Archive Press, 2021.
Articles
- (Un)Disciplining Traumatic Memory: Mission Orphanages and the Afterlife of Genocide in Micheline Aharonian MarcomâÂÂs The Daydreaming Boy (with Rebecca Saunders), Contemporary Women's Writing, 2010
- Traumatic Infidelities: Translating the Literature of the Armenian Genocide, 2012
References