On Tuesday, April 29th, at 7:00pm, the Zohrab Center will host a conversation between internationally renowned author, Narine Abgaryan, and her English-language translators, Margarit Ordukhanyan and Zara Torlone, in celebration of the release of the short story collection To Go on Living (Plough Press, 2025) and as part of the author’s April US tour.
At the event will be copies of the book for sale and a book signing with the author and translators.
About the Book
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 mountain 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.
About the Author
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.
About the Translators
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.
Advance Praise for To Go on Living
I was blown away by these stories of war told through the lives of ordinary folk in a small rural community. Understated and exquisite, full of compassion and humanity, humor and hope, they enrich us with their tender portrayal of resilience in the face of brutality and tragedy. Narine Abgaryan is a writer of genius.
—Mary Chamberlain, author of The Dressmaker’s War
Narine Abgaryan is an Armenian who writes in Russian and lives in Germany. As her Russian reader and admirer, I will say that in our literature she is one of a kind: she is absolutely at home and actually occupies one of the most venerable rooms. This book is about Armenia, a country that has seen much suffering. Yet despite describing tragic and at times terrifying events, To Go On Living contains neither desperation nor bitterness. It contains only grief, love, and hope.
—Eugene Vodalazkin, author of Laurus
Narine Abgaryan’s stories describe universal pain of war that transcends boundaries and ethnicities. As an Azerbaijani, I appreciated these narratives of Armenians who lived through war between Azerbaijan and Armenia and carry its scars. The author shows how wounds of war linger from generation to generation. The everyday realities of traumatized people who have to live with memories of war and loss come alive in these pages and remind us that suffering, like love and mercy, is above politics and can be a uniting force between former enemies.
—Agshin Jafarov, Azerbaijani novelist