For Anna Mekunts, poetry is less a craft than a state of being. She writes as she feels — without prescribed forms or rules — believing that true poetry can only be born within freedom. Her creative process is never planned. It begins in moments of emotional outpouring, fueled by life, people and pain.
“It is a blended flow of soul and consciousness when I write,” the writer told the Weekly. For her, literature is not merely a sequence of words, but a domain where, as she put it, “every word has a soul.”
Anna Mekunts posing with a newspaper that features her
As a native of Artsakh, Mekunts carries the weight of her people’s sorrow in her poetry — a pain, she says, “I, unfortunately, drag every day in my cracked soul, in my heart.” Her characters are not invented; they are drawn from real people she has known and loved. In their voices, national grief becomes deeply personal and universal at once.
For Mekunts, creating art is a form of resistance — against erasure, against the forces that “want to turn reality into a myth” and compel people to forget.
“Through my heroes, I tell the story that it is forbidden to forget and deny, even if we are forced to.”
Even her love poems bear the traces of homeland and loss. “They symbolize abandoned cities,” she explained — where the heart is in pain but never stops loving and waiting, reflecting the idea that “this is the same love of the homeland: it hurts, but it continues to love and wait.”
Anna Mekunts A short poem and biography by Anna Mekunts Anna Mekunts’ 2020 “The Sun Rises From the Middle” Anna Mekunts
When Mekunts was forcefully displaced from Artsakh, she arrived in Armenia searching for work. She found a job in journalism through friends, but soon left the field. “They were turning something sacred to me into politics and commerce,” she said.
That disillusionment drew her back to literature and art, where she felt her voice belonged. Mekunts later founded BidaTon Production, the name derived from the Artsakh dialect meaning “A glance toward home.” The theater company and cultural platform preserves the dialect and traditions of Artsakh through staged works that recount daily life, war, displacement and memory.
“We are preserving the very essence of Artsakh within BidaTon,” she stated. Many of her poems — including the dialectal piece, “Tuns, Teghs, Artsakhs” (“My Home, My Place, My Artsakh”) — have already been adapted into songs.
Now, in what she describes as a new creative phase, Mekunts is preparing her sixth book, “The Breath of the Roots,” and a forthcoming stage play, “Sky 99,” which will explore the relationship between God and humanity. Both works, she explained, carry the same message: “In times of life’s eclipse, never forget that God is your guide. Always remain fearless, and hold two important things in your heart: God and the homeland.”
Women occupy a central place in her poetry — figures who are “internally fractured, yet strong.” Through them, she aims to provide “a complex yet honest view of the female identity,” allowing readers “to perceive the inner world of man.”
Mekunts describes her approach as one of radical sincerity. “I try to be maximally honest,” she stated. Even when telling others’ stories, she “relives every word, because every word has a soul.”
Her chosen pen name, Mekunts, carries its own lineage. Her legal surname is Davtyan, but at her grandfather’s urging, she adopted the ancestral name of her family’s clan, known for their unity and generosity. They were called Mekunts because “they always helped all their neighbors and stayed united,” she explained.
She credits her creative development to a constellation of influences: Charles Aznavour, Virginia Woolf and, notably, Hasmik Simonyan, her creative writing teacher, who revealed the new Mekunts within her.
“Poetry in contemporary Armenia is not just an art form; it is a space for resistance, identity and spiritual survival,” the writer explained.
In her conviction, “Poetry changes consciousness, and consciousness changes reality.”
Her poetry is precisely that act of transformation — a voice that insists the homeland never forgets its children, and that love, no matter how burdened by pain, always endures.
All photos courtesy of Anna Mekunts.
