Angelus 2016 goes to Varujan Vosganian [PHOTOS]

The jury of the Angelus Award announced the verdict on the Saturday evening of 15th October during an official gala in the Capitol Music Theatre. Varujan Vosganian became the double laureate of the award – at first, he received the Natalya Gorbanevskaya Award determined by readers’ votes. ‘Art should not create conclusions. Conclusions kill art. Art is a sort of testimony and it is readers who create conclusions, and everyone who reads becomes a writer in a certain way,’ said the author when receiving the award granted by readers in the online voting.

A moment later, his name was announced already as the winner of the Angelus Award by Mykola Ryabchuk, the chairman of the jury. Earlier he had said: ‘The choice was not easy, because we had to choose from among seven brilliant authors and seven books, each of which deserves the award. We chose the winner after long and difficult discussions.’

Vosganian, a Romanian of Armenian descent, is the author of ‘The Book of Whispers’ published by Książkowe Klimaty in Wroclaw in the Polish translation by Joanna Kornaś-Warwa, who also received an award as the translator of the winning book that evening.

Characterised by an extremely intricate structure, ‘The Book of Whispers’ tells a story of the genocide of the Armenians committed by the Turks in 1915. It is not only a description of a tragedy – it is, above all, a call for the memory of the victims. Turkey has never acknowledged the extermination of the Armenians as a genocide, and the Turkish government has consistently tried to obliterate the traces of these events. Few documents on this topic have survived, most of those who witnessed and survived these events passed away, and it is a taboo subject in Turkey. Vosganian speaks up for the Armenians murdered at that time– there might have been even 1.5 million of them. ‘The Book of Whispers’ is the first novel by Varujan Vosganian, who is not only a writer and a poet, but also a recognised economist and politician. The book was published in 2009 and has been reissued twice since then.

‘When I met Joanna Kornaś-Warwas for the first time three years ago and allowed her to translate my book into Polish, one of the arguments she presented to publishing houses was that this book might win the Angelus Award,‘ recollected Varujan Vosganian.

‘I believe that, by describing a tragedy on such a scale, I described all tragedies of this world. Great tragedies do not have one language. In history, death is an abstract concept expressed by digits with many zeros; in literature, there are no digits, everyone dies and suffers for himself,’ said the writer when receiving the Angelus Award from the hands of Rafał Dutkiewicz, the Mayor of Wroclaw. ‘If we are to cure humanity, we will do this not through politics or history, but through culture. Culture is “the road to Damascus,” through which we will be saved.’

‘I knew about the Armenian Genocide even before my birth,’ said Varujan Vosganian after the receipt of the award. ‘One of the oldest Armenian communities in Europe lives in Romania. It is represented by a number of people who played an important role in Romanian society and history. Many Armenians found a home here after the massacre committed by the Turks in 1915. I am a grandson of survivors. Things were not easy for us during Ceaușescu’s regime. We could not organise or act. We were focused around our church and this is how we have preserved our memory. When I sat in the Romanian parliament, I represented not only Romanians, but also my community. Today many Armenians from the Middle East ask for an asylum in Europe, and they look for it Romania, too; now I, as a descendant of Armenian refugees, confirm their Armenian roots.’

Varujan Vosganian was a Minister of Finance in the Romanian government: ‘Once I was asked which function is more important to me: a minister or a poet. I answered that everyone could replace me as a minister, but if I had not been born, my poems would not have been written.’

The Angelus Central European Literature Award is granted by the City of Wroclaw. The winner is selected by the jury consisting of the chairman Mykola Ryabchuk, Professor Stanisław Bereś, Piotr Kępiński, Ryszard Krynicki, Tomasz Łubieński, Krzysztof Masłoń, Justyna Sobolewska, Mirosław Spychalski and Professor Andrzej Zawada. The winner of the award receives a statuette designed by Ewa Rossano and the amount of 150,000 PLN. If the Angelus Award goes to a foreign writer, a separate award financed by the Angelus Silesius University of Applied Sciences in Wałbrzych (in the amount of 20,000 PLN) is also granted to the translator of his book.