Mariam Petrosyan


Mariam Petrosyan is an Armenian painter, cartoonist and Russian-language novelist. She is most well known as the author of the award-winning novel The Gray House, translated into eight languages.

Biography

Mariam Petrosyan was born in 1969 in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. After finishing an art college she became a cartoonist at the Studio of Armenfilm. Later she moved to Moscow to work at Soyuzmultfilm, but came back to Yerevan in 1995 and returned to Armenfilm. She worked there until 2007.
Her first novel, The Gray House, tells of a boarding school for disabled children and was published in Russian in 2009, becoming a bestseller. It was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize in 2010 and received several awards and nominations, among them the 2009 Russian Prize for the best book in Russian by an author living abroad.
The book has been translated into Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Spanish, French, Czech, and Macedonian languages.
The worldwide English edition came out on 25 April 2017, from AmazonCrossing; it has been shortlisted for the 2018 Read Russia Prize. Selling rights for Danish, Latvian and Norwegian translations were also announced by Petrosyan's literary agency.
Excerpts from the novel were narrated by Stephen Fry in the film Russia's Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin.
The only other book by the author to date is a short fairy tale, The Dog Who Could Fly.

Personal life

Mariam is married to Armenian graphic artist Artashes Stamboltsyan. They have two children. She is a great-granddaughter of the painter Martiros Saryan.