Zareh Vorpouni's The Candidate Published in English

Zareh Vorpouni (1902–1980) was a prominent French Armenian writer. He was the author of numerous novels and short story collections, including The Persecuted, a cycle of four novels published between 1929 and 1974: The Attempt (1929), The Candidate (1967), Asphalt (1972), and A Regular Day (1974).

Zareh Vorpouni: The Renegade of Late 20th Century Western Armenian Literature

Jennifer Manoukian

 

Zareh Vorpouni was a lone ranger. In a corpus that spanned genre and era, he embodied the new, the experimental, and the transgressive in Western Armenian fiction in a way that few writers can, or have cared to, rival. Writing most prolifically in the 1960’s and 1970’s when readers and interest in literature were in decline, Vorpouni’s cultural apotheosis in the eyes of the Armenian diaspora never happened in his lifetime, during which he was read and admired only by a small group of Armenian intellectuals mostly concentrated in France—his home from 1922 until his death in 1980.

But Vorpouni’s obscurity is unwarranted, especially in a day and age in which the touchstones of Armenian diaspora culture are growing stale and many are in search of the freshness and the intellectual vigor that Vorpouni epitomized.