“The Story Behind the Sandcastle Girls: The Centennial of the Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About.” 
By Chris Bohjalian, Award Winning Novelist and Vermont Resident

Thursday, April 2, 2015
3:30-5:30 PM
UVM Davis Center, Livak Ballroom, Room 417/419

Where do fact and fiction meet in a work of historical fiction? In Bohjalian's slide show, he will be sharing why he structured his novel of the Armenian Genocide, "The Sandcastle Girls," as a love story -- and where his personal family history fits in. Many of the images he will share come from his travels through the Middle East, Turkey, and Armenia.

Chris Bohjalian is the author of 17 books, including ten New York Times bestsellers.  His work has been translated into roughly 30 languages and three have become movies. His awards include, but are not limited to, the ANCA Freedom Award for his work educating Americans about the Armenian Genocide and the ANCA Arts and Letters Award for The Sandcastle Girls.

His books have been chosen as Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Hartford Courant, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Bookpage, and Salon.  He has received numerous awards, and has written for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest, and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine.  He has been a weekly columnist in Vermont for the Burlington Free Press since February 1992. 

April 24, 2015 marks the one-hundred-year anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian genocide on which Chris Bohjalian’s deeply moving and personal 15th novel, The Sandcastle Girls, is based.