| Hagop Oshagan | |
| Birth Name: | Hagop Kufejian |
| Birth Date: | December 9, 1883 |
| Birth Place: | Soloz, Bursa |
| Death Place: | Aleppo |
| Occupation: | writer, playwright, and novelist |
| Children: | Vahé Oshagan (1921-2000) |
Hagop Oshagan (hy|Յակոբ Օշական; December 9, 1883, in Soloz, Bursa – February 17, 1948, in Aleppo), was an Armenian writer, playwright, and novelist.[1] Among his many novels are the trilogy To One Hundred and One Years (Հարիւր մէկ տարուան), The Harlot (Ծակ պտուկը), and his best-known work, Remnants (Մնացորդաց, 3 vols., 1932-1934), parts of which have been translated into English by G.M.Goshgarian.
Oshagan was born in 1883 as Hagop Kufejian in Soloz, a village near Bursa. He was spared the fate of many of his fellow writers and managed to elude the Turkish secret police until early 1918, when he fled from Constantinople to Bulgaria, disguised as a German officer. After the armistice, he returned to Constantinople in 1919, where he adopted his literary surname and taught literature. At the end of 1922, he left Constantinople permanently after the arrival of the Kemalist forces. He lived briefly in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and then worked as an instructor of Armenian literature in Egypt (1924-1928), Cyprus (1928-1935), and Palestine (1935-1948). He died while on a visit to Aleppo, just before a planned visit to Deir ez-Zor, where hundreds of thousands of Armenians had perished during the Armenian genocide. The genocide of the Armenians defined Oshagan's larger project — the literary reconstruction of the lost ancestral homeland. He wrote his major works in exile, devoting his knowledge of Armenian literature and his intimate experiences of village life and Turkish-Armenian relations to this project.
His output as a literary critic and historian is grounded in the Panorama of Armenian Literature (Համապատկեր արեւմտահայ գրականութեան, 10 vols., 1945-1982), which has been used as a textbook in Armenian high schools. He is also the author of shorter, book-length volumes of literary studies.
His son Vahé Oshagan (1921-2000) followed in his father's footsteps. A poet, short story author, novelist, essayist, and literary scholar, he became one of the most important writers and public intellectuals of the Armenian diaspora.