Capturing the Armenian Experience: Novelist, Poet Nancy Kricorian

Kricorian continued to write poetry and studied comparative literature at Dartmouth College. She was awarded a Dartmouth Senior Fellowship in poetry for her manuscript, Asking Everything, or Off Balance in Red Tutu. As an MFA student at Columbia University, she began publishing her poems in literary journals.

After the death of her grandmother, Kricorian transitioned to longer prose, shifting her focus from poetry to fiction, with her grandmother’s life serving as the inspiration for a series of short stories. These stories eventually evolved into her first novel, Zabelle — a fictionalized account of her grandmother’s experiences as a Genocide survivor and young immigrant to the US. In the novel, protagonist Zabelle Chahasbanian faces the challenges of an arranged marriage, assimilation and discovering a new life in Watertown, Mass. — far away from her ancestral home.

In her second novel, Dreams of Bread and Fire, Kricorian continued her own exploration of the post-Genocide Diaspora experience by tackling the issues that face women of her own generation who grew up in the shadow of the atrocities of the Genocide. The book’s protagonist witnesses the affects it had on the older generations and goes on her own journey of discovery of these tragic events.

With each novel, Kricorian has explored a new aspect of Armenian identity and the relationship between history and memory, as well as revisited themes from previous her works. “I grew up in the Armenian community Watertown, and since I left to make my way in the broader world, the history of the Armenian people, particularly the post-Genocide Diaspora experience, has fascinated me,” said Kricorian.

Kricorian’s latest book, All the Light There Was, is a coming-of-age story of an Armenian family living in Paris during the Nazi Occupation and is centered around a teenage girl, Maral. “All the Light There Was required a vast amount of research, much more than I had done for the first two books, which were more closely based on family history. I loved the research, especially interviewing Armenians in their 70s, 80s and 90s who had lived in Paris during the war,” Kricorian explained.

As Kricorian conducted historical research, she said she “started wondering what it must have been like for Genocide survivors who had made their way to France and had rebuilt their lives and communities to see the Nazis marching into Paris. I didn’t want to write a novel about extreme heroics, but rather hoped to write about an ordinary Armenian family’s experience.”