Gurgen Mahari

[1] His most significant works include the semi-autobiographical novella Barbed Wires in Blossom (1968) and the novel Burning Orchards (1966), which is set in the writer's hometown of Van on the eve of the Armenian genocide.

Gurgen fled to Eastern Armenia in 1915 during the Armenian genocide and found refuge in orphanages in Etchmiadzin, Dilijan, and Yerevan.

He was arrested in 1936, during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge and sentenced to 11 years imprisonment in a Siberia Gulag.

He is also the author of Charents-name (1968), memoirs about Armenian poet Yeghishe Charents, and of Barbed Wires in Blossom, a novella based largely on his personal experiences in a Soviet concentration camp.

Against the wishes of his wife, a heartbroken Mahari began rewriting his novel to remove the disputed passages, but died before the revisions were complete.