YEREVAN-PARIS — Marina Dédéyan is a French novelist of Armenian and Russian descent. She was born in the port city of Saint-Malo and spent her childhood and adolescence in Montpellier. Coming from a family deeply shaped by history and literature, she inherited a passion for books and storytelling from an early age. She is the daughter of medieval historian Gérard Dédéyan and the granddaughter of literary scholar Charles Dédéyan. Marina published her first novel, Moi, Constance, princesse d’Antioche, the real story of an Armeno-French princess during the Crusades, in 2023. Her historical novels often combine adventure, family memory, and multicultural worlds, drawing inspiration from Armenian, Russian and European history. To date, she has published eight novels, including L’Aigle de Constantinople (The Eagle of Constantinople), De tempête et d’espoir (Of Storm and Hope), Là où le crépuscule s’unit à l’aube (Where Twilight Meets the Dawn), Les Vikings de Novgorod (The Vikings of Novgorod). She currently lives near Paris, where she works as a writer and a consultant in Change Management.
Dear Marina, it is rather rare among Armenians to come from a family of intellectuals whose cultural activity goes back to the nineteenth century. Your Smyrna Armenian ancestors played an important role in Armenian cultural life. Do you feel that writing and literature were somehow “in your genes”? How did your family background influence you as a writer?
My Armenian family’s love of books began earlier. Before coming to Smyrna at the end of the 18th century, when my ancestors lived in Tomarza, in Anatolia, they bought an edition of the famous Armenian Bible of Amsterdam, which is now lost.
In the mid-19th century, they founded a publishing house to promote education for Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. They aimed to connect them through a unified language via literature and translations of European writers such as Lamartine, Dumas, Hugo, Chateaubriand, Goethe, and Shakespeare. Thanks to this publishing house, many Armenians discovered these masterpieces of European literature in their own language and opened their minds to new ideas, become book lovers.
So, naturally, writing and literature are in my genes. However, when your ancestors have translated such great writers, it’s difficult to become a writer yourself because you feel very humble and small compared to these giants. Somewhere, you have to break through a wall to find your place.
Having Armenian roots has had a strong influence on me as a writer. Because of their history, Armenians are connectors between countries, cultures, and civilizations. However, they are also strongly attached to their identity and past. When I write about the Crusades, the birth of Russia, the Seven Years’ War, World War II, or the end of the Russian Empire, I explore topics such as turning points in history, lessons from the past, and the identity of peoples.
