Atamian Wins 2017 Tölölyan Prize in Contemporary Literature for ‘A Poet in Washington Heights’
WATERTOWN, Mass.—The Regional Executive Committee of Hamazkayin Armenian Educational and Cultural Society of the Eastern United States announced on Friday that Christopher Atamian is the winner of the fourth Minas and Kohar Tölölyan Prize in Contemporary Literature, for his forthcoming poetry collection entitled A Poet in Washington Heights. The book will be published by Nauset Press.
Atamian was the winner of the inaugural Minas and Kohar Tölölyan Prize in Contemporary Literature, for his translation of Nigoghos Sarafian’s The Bois de Vincennes.
Atamian is a translator, writer, and director. In 2006, he produced the OBIE Award-winning play “Trouble in Paradise” and was included as an invited artist to the 2009 Venice Biennale for his video “Desire.” His short films and videos have screened throughout the world and he appears regularly in such publications as the Huffington Post and the New York Times, and was for several years the dance critic for the now-defunct New York Press. Atamian has written one novel, Speaking French, and has worked on several commercial musicals and film scripts.
In his work as a translator, Atamian has translated six books from French and Western Armenian into English, including The Bois de Vincennes, and three for Columbia University’s Middle Eastern Studies Department: Krikor Beledian’s Fifty Years of Armenian Literature in France, and Marc Nichanian’s Literature and Catastrophe and The Armenian Language throughout History. He has also translated Philippe Delma’s The Rosy Future of War (The Free Press) and is currently at work on Denis Donikian’s Vidures/Offal, an award-winning novel published on Actes Sud.