Anna Davtyan

- Armenia -

Anna Davtyan is a writer, translator, and photographer residing and working in Armenia. She is the author of a bilingual (Armenian, English - translation by the author) collection of poems, Book of Gratitude (2012). 

 

Her first novel, Khanna (2020), which received a fellowship grant from the Armenian Ministry of Education and Culture, is an offbeat detective story focusing on women’s issues in present–day Armenia.  

 

Davtyan’s third book, Bouquet (2023) is a multi-genre anthology which includes poems, short stories, essays, a play, and variations. 

 

Her novel, Zora (2024) uncovers the public and personal grief after the Armenian-Azerbaijani war in 2020, and reaches to ring the bell for the universal problems of global warming and nuclear weapons. 

 

Her translation work features the Beat Generation – Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and other writers like Alice Munro, Doris Lessing, Carolyn Forché, William Carlos Williams, Richard Brautigan, David Kherdian, etc. 

 

Davtyan’s dramaturgy piece A Shipload of Carnations for Hrant Dink was staged by the German theater Krefeld und Munchengladbach in Germany, premiered in September, 2016.  http://theater-kr-mg.de/spielplan/inszenierung/eine-schiffsladung-nelken-fuer-hrant-dink-urauffuehrung/ The play has been translated into Persian, published in Tehran twice by different publishing houses and sold out for a very short period of time. 

 

She has written numerous essays and short stories for the literary journal Inknagir, some of which have been translated into English and published internationally — LARB, Asymptote, Wasafiri, Circumference, etc. 

 

She is currently working on a series-puzzle of critical pieces on literature about the laboratory of writing titled Breakfasts, which has received a fellowship grant from the RA Ministry of Education and Culture. 

 

In photography, Davtyan works on a long-term project On the Seashore of Armenia unveiling the reality of a land having no access to the sea, but dreaming about it, and the depths of Armenian-ness. https://www.4plus.org/on-the-seashore-of-armenia/