YEREVEAN/TBILISI/KYIV/FRANKFURT— “Visual Stories from Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine” will debut this October at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest publishing event. This trilingual literary-graphic work, funded by EU Creative Europe, brings together three award-winning authors — Ani Asatryan (Armenia), Ekaterine Togonidze (Georgia), and Vira Kuryko (Ukraine) — to amplify women’s voices in times of war.
Edited and coordinated by Mikheil Tsikhelashvili, the project pairs each writer with an illustrator selected through an open competition: Astghik Harutyunyan (Armenia), Luka Lashkhi (Georgia), and Sofia Pokorchak (Ukraine). The resulting collection blends oral testimonies, archival research, and visual storytelling into powerful short graphic narratives.
In her chapter, Asatryan interweaves contemporary Armenian women’s testimonies with the century-old story of Maro, a child in an orphanage during the First World War, drawing parallels between past and present civilian suffering. The work confronts the gap between lived tragedy and the world’s shifting attention.
“Frankfurt is not just about one author — it’s about securing long-term visibility for Armenian literature, translation, and cultural exchange,” says Asatryan.
The project is co-published by ARI Literature Foundation (Armenia), Komora (Ukraine), and the Georgian Literature Initiative (Georgia), with mentorship from Reinhard Kleist, Max und Moritz Prize winner. Frankfurt, with more than 180,000 publishing professionals in attendance, is a key arena for securing translation rights, building global readership, and positioning Eastern European cultural narratives on the international stage.
Ani Asatryan is an Armenian writer and Chevening alum (University of Sussex), whose work has appeared in “Absinthe: World Literature in Translation” (University of Michigan Comparative Literature) and “Words Without Borders,” and has been taught at UC Berkeley and the University of Basel. Her work blends narrative, visual, and historical forms, with a focus on cultural memory, research, and transnational collaboration.
