Olivia Katrandjian, the founder and President of IALA, is an Armenian American writer and journalist with a background in print reporting and documentary filmmaking. She has worked in Thailand, Armenia, and New York, and her reporting has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the BBC, PBS, ABC News, the Huffington Post, the Bergen Record, Quartz, and Ms., among other outlets.
In 2016, she moved to Luxembourg to write The Ghost Soldier, a historical novel based on the Ghost Army, a top-secret group of artists who used inflatable tanks, sound effects, and fake radio transmissions to deceive the Germans in the Second World War. The manuscript was awarded second place in the National Literary Prize of Luxembourg in 2019.
The Children Shall Be Spared was longlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize in 2020. Forced Reflection, about the waiting periods women in countries around the world must endure after requesting an abortion, was longlisted for the 2021 Cambridge Short Story Prize, shortlisted for the 2021 Oxford-BNU Award, selected as runner up in the Oxford Review of Books Fiction Competition in 2022, and nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.
A 2021 Creative Armenia-AGBU fellow, Olivia is currently pursuing a graduate degree in creative writing at Oxford University. Her work is forthcoming in We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora, an anthology of essays slated for publication with University of Texas Press in 2023.