Taleen Voskuni puts Armenian diasporic life at the heart of modern romance

“I’ve been writing my whole life, but I didn’t really try to write a novel until 2016,” says Taleen Voskuni, the San Francisco-based author behind modern sensations like Sorry, Bro and Lavash at First Sight and the newly released Our Ex’s Wedding. Each of her novels is rooted in the Armenian diaspora experience — a reality she knows intimately. 

Voskuni attended KZV Armenian School and has long been active in the local Armenian community. Her family’s roots trace back to historic Cilicia: Adana, Sis and Marash. Survivors of the Armenian Genocide, her relatives resettled in Damascus, Syria, then Beirut, Lebanon, before eventually fleeing the Lebanese Civil War and settling in San Francisco. That intergenerational story of survival, migration and reinvention quietly shapes her fiction.