VARTAN MATIOSSIAN PRESENTS BOOK OF GOSTAN ZARIAN IN MONTREAL

On Thursday, Oct. 13, Vartan Matiossian, Executive Director of the Eastern Prelacy, presented in Montreal his newly published edition of Gostan Zarian’s novella The Island and A Man in Armenian, commissioned by the Oshagan Series of the Canadian Regional of Hamazkayin. The presentation was held at the Gundjian Hall of Hamazkayin, with the participation of literary scholar Viken Tufenkjian and poet Haroutioun Berberian, members of the editorial board of the Oshagan Series.  

Dr. Matiossian, historian and literary scholar, has published extensively on the life and work of Gostan Zarian for the past three decades in Armenian, English, and Spanish, including scores of articles and the first monograph about this noted writer in 1998. This edition of The Island and a Man, a fictionalized account of the meeting of Zarian with his literary friend Lawrence Durrell, the celebrated British novelist and poet, in the Italian island of Ischia, where they spent the summer of 1950, also contains an edited and annotated dossier of the relationship of both writers.  

On Saturday, Oct. 15, Dr. Matiossian was a guest lecturer at the Levon Shant Armenian Studies Program of Hamazkayin Montreal on the subject “The literary movement of Constantinople (1908-1914).” 

This is the fourth book published by Dr. Matiossian this year, after his two books The Politics of the Armenian Genocide: Language, History, and ‘Medz Yeghern’ and A Woman of the World: Armen Ohanian, the “Dancer of Shamakha” (with Artsvi Bakhchinyan), as well as his translation into Spanish of Aurora Mardiganian’s Ravished Armenia.