Shushan Avagyan

Shushan Avagyan is an Armenian author, translator and Associate Professor at the American University of Armenia's College of Humanities and Social Sciences, where she is the coordinator of the Graduate Certificate in Translation Program.
Avagyan has translated into English a volume of Shushanik Kurghinian’s poetry, as well as works by Russian critics Boris Arvatov and Viktor Shklovsky. Her articles and translations have been published in academic journals including: Contemporary Women's Writing, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Asymptote, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2003, she co-founded the Women's Resource Center in Yerevan with Lara Aharonian and Gohar Shahnazaryan.
Avagynan's debut novel, Girq-anvernagir, was published in 2006. The English translation was a winner of the English PEN Translates Award in 2023.

Early life

Avagynan was born in 1976 in Soviet Armenia. As a child, she lived in Zambia and Ethiopia with her parents, who taught there due to the Soviet Teach Abroad Program. After graduating from Khachik Dashtents School in Yerevan, she moved to Cyprus to study at the Melkonian Educational Institute in Nicosia. She received her undergraduate degree in studio art at Cedar Crest College, and her master's and doctoral degrees in English studies from Illinois State University.

Girq-anvernagir, samizdat, 2006 . ISBN 99930-4-583-7 ; ISBN 978-1-911284-88-8 ; ISBN 979-1280084842.
Queered: What’s to be done with Xcentric art?, the Queering Yerevan Collective, 2011
Zarubyani Kanayq '', samizdat, 2014.
Violent Phenomena: 21 essays on Translation, Titled Axis Press, 2021. ISBN 978-1-911284-78-9.

Shushanik Kurghinian, I want to live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian, Armenian International Women's Association, 2005. ISBN 978-0964878754.
Viktor Shklovsky, Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, Dalkey Archive Press, 2007. ISBN 9781564784261.
Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Dust : Dalkey Archive Press, 2009. ISBN 978-1-56478-419-3.
Viktor Shklovsky, Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar, Dalkey Archive Press, 2011. ISBN 9781564784254.
Viktor Shklovsky, A Hunt for Optimism, Dalkey Archive Press, 2013. ISBN 9781564788238.
Viktor Shklovsky, The Hamburg Score, Dalkey Archive Press, 2017.
Boris Arvatov, Art and Production, Pluto Press, 2017. ISBD 9780745337364.
Hovhannes Tumanyan, Quatrains, 2019. ISBN 978-9939-858-13-5.
Viktor Shklovsky, On the Theory of Prose, Dalkey Archive Press, 2021. ISBN 9781564787699.

Disciplining Traumatic Memory: Mission Orphanages and the Afterlife of Genocide in Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s The ''Daydreaming Boy, Contemporary Women's Writing, 2010
Traumatic Infidelities: Translating the Literature of the Armenian Genocide'', 2012