ARMENIAN FRANCOPHONE WRITERS

Abstract

Due to the historical and political upheavals at the beginning of the 20th century—the 1915
Armenian Genocide, continuous wars, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the fall of the First
Republic of Armenia—the Armenian people were forced to leave their historical homeland and seek
refuge in various countries.
Some creative individuals began writing in the official languages of their new host countries.
This is how Armenian writers in English, French, Russian, Spanish, Romanian, Bulgarian,
Arabic, and Turkish emerged. For this reason, literary studies use the term “Armenian writers in
foreign languages,” rather than “foreign-language Armenian literature,” since the phenomenon refers
to authorship, not to the formation of a separate literary tradition.