Anri Grigoryan

I was born in Georgia, Soviet Union collapsed and the wars erupted at the dawn of a new decade. Then there were dark and cold years and my parents’ growing dream of seeing me as a banker. I used to wear glasses and had an exclusively intelligent look, so they thought I would look great sitting in a bank and counting money. I was studying Banking for four years, counting expenses and revenues of hypothetical banks, getting good grades, and desperately searching for poetry behind the numbers. In the end, to the greatest disappointment of my parents, my faculty decided to rename the Bachelor program calling it Business Administration, and putting in my hands Major in Business Administration Diploma, ironically with Honors. I decided to pursue something else. After the endless search, I settled down and decided to write. In the beginning, my parents were happy with my decision as it would fit my reputation of being an intelligent boy. However, one day their happiness vanished as in my writings they discovered dirty words, a couple of allusions to sexual intercourse, and dirty adventures. And yes, boy, pray to God that one day your aunts don’t find out that you depicted one of them in bra, calling her “my bolshevichka auntie”, and wrote about the other one: “she is airy as the wind and destructive as a tsunami”. My parents concluded that my literature is non-Armenian and decided to hide my book from our Armenian relatives: my Silly Joyce wasn’t published. 

 

Armenia Has Never Seemed So Much Like An Open Wound

Anything that a writer says will be understood and accepted if it does not contain hate