Ottoman authorities arrested Armenian leaders in Constantinople in April 1915 and organised deportations from Anatolia towards the Syrian desert. Mass killing, starvation and forced marches destroyed much of the Ottoman Armenian population. Survivors established major communities in Beirut, Paris, Los Angeles and other cities.

Poet Daniel Varoujan and many other Armenian intellectuals were murdered, creating an immense rupture in Armenian culture. Survivor and diaspora writers such as Zabel Yessayan and later Peter Balakian made testimony, inherited trauma and the lost homeland central literary concerns.