Book Presentation

To Go On Living: A Conversation between Narine Abgaryan and her translators: Margarit Ordukhanyan & Zara Torlone

Zohrab Information Center at the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America

29 avr. 2025 7:00 PM

630 Second Avenue, New York, NY 11209

New York - United States

Set in rural Armenia in the aftermath of war, Narine Abgaryan’s haunting short stories show people finding hope and purpose again. Named “one of Europe’s most exciting authors” by the Guardian, Narine Abgaryan has written a dozen books which have collectively sold over 1.35 million copies. To Go On Living comes directly from her experiences coming of age during the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the early 1990s. Set in an Armenian moutain village, thirty-one linked short stories trace the interconnected lives of villagers tending to their everyday tasks, engaging in quotidian squabbles, and celebrating small joys against a breathtaking landscape. Yet the setting, suspended in time and space, belies unspeakable tragedy: every character contends with an unbearable burden of loss. The war rages largely off the book’s pages, appearing only in fragmented flashbacks. Abgaryan’s stories focus on how the survivors work, both as individuals and as a community, to find a way forward. Written in Abgaryan’s signature style that weaves elements of Armenian folk tradition into her prose, these stories of community, courage, and resilience celebrate human life, where humor, love and hope prevail in unthinkable circumstances. Narine Abgaryan’s stories shed fresh light on this forgotten corner of the world. “Humanity is in dire need of hope, of kind stories,” she told the Guardian. She’s given them to us here.

NARINE ABGARYAN was born in 1971 in Berd, Armenia, to a doctor and a school teacher. Named one of Europe’s most exciting

authors by the Guardian, she is the author of a dozen books, which have collectively sold over 1.35 million copies. Her book Three Apples Fell from the Sky won the Leo Tolstoy Yasnaya Polyana Award and an English PEN Award, and has been translated into 27 languages. Her award-winning trilogy about Manunia, a busy and troublesome 11-year-old, has been made into a TV series. Abgaryan divides her time between Armenia and Germany.

Margarit Ordukhanyan, PhD, is a New York-based scholar and translator of poetry and prose from her native Armenian and Russian into English. She was a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellow and is currently a fellow at the Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities at the New York Public Library.

Zara Torlone, PhD, a native of Armenia, is a professor in the classics department at Miami University, Ohio. She received her BA in classical philology from Moscow University and her PhD in classics from Columbia University. She is the author of Russia and the Classics: Poetry’s Foreign Muse (Duckworth, 2009) and Vergil in Russia: National Identity and Classical Reception (Oxford University Press, 2015), among other books.