Narine Abgaryan. "To Go on Living." A book talk and bilingual reading, followed by a conversation with the author and translator Margarit Ordukhanyan.

Set in an Armenian mountain village immediately after the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the early 1990s, Abgaryan's To Go On Living traces the interconnected lives of villagers tending to their everyday tasks, engaging in quotidian squabbles, and celebrating small joys against a breathtaking landscape. Yet the setting, suspended in time and space, belies unspeakable tragedy: every character contends with an unbearable burden of loss. The war rages largely off the book’s pages, appearing only in fragmented flashbacks. Abgaryan’s stories focus on how, in the war’s aftermath, the survivors work, as individuals and as a community, to find a way forward. Written in Abgaryan’s signature style that weaves elements of Armenian folk tradition into her prose, these stories of community, courage, and resilience celebrate human life, where humor and love and hope prevail in unthinkable circumstances.

Narine Abgaryan was born in 1971 in Berd, Armenia, to a doctor and a school teacher. Named one of Europe’s most exciting authors by the Guardian, she is the author of a dozen books, which have collectively sold over 1.35 million copies. Her book Three Apples Fell From the Sky (Oneworld, 2020) won the Leo Tolstoy Yasnaya Polyana Award and an English PEN Award, and has been translated into 27 languages. Her award-winning trilogy about Manunia, a busy and troublesome 11-year-old, has been made into a TV series. Abgaryan divides her time between Armenia and Germany.

Margarit Ordukhanyan is a New York-based scholar and translator of poetry and prose from her native Armenian and Russian into English. Ordukhanyan was the Fall 2022 Translator-in-Residence at the University of Iowa’s Translation Workshop and a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellow. She is currently a fellow at the Center for Humanities Research at the New York Public Library.