Armen Melikian (b. 1963) holds a Master's in international relations from American University in Washington, DC. He has also studied mathematics at Harvard and elsewhere, and was admitted by the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University to pursue graduate studies in Analytic Geometry, Mathematical Physics, and Topology. However, he eventually abandoned both politics and mathematics in favor of literature and dedicated his life to writing. Melikian lives in Los Angeles.Melikian is one of those rare thinkers whose intensity of passion matches their sharp wit and intellect. His poignant observations take to task the core tenets of meta-ideologies and jockeying civilizations, helping to discard layer after layer of entrenched misinformation and dogma.Melikian brings a fresh, prodigiously layered voice to contemporary literature. He expands the limits of the novel as an art medium, and infuses it with extraordinary urgency and relevance in terms of sociopolitical, cultural, religious, philosophical thought as well as mythological exegesis.To date, awards and honors earned by his debut novel, 'Journey to Virginland,' include the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award for Best Fiction. The novel was selected by the Next Generation Indie Book Awards as one of the year's top books in the Humor/Comedy category, and received the only Honorable Mention at the prestigious ForeWord Reviews' Book of the Year Awards in Literary Fiction. These awards were based on a limited pre-publication copy of the book that was made available by the publisher before its release.Given its prescient vision of the shape of things to come, Melikian's novel has been compared by critics to some of the masterpieces of contemporary literature, among them the politically explosive works of George Orwell. It has also been compared to Gurdjieff's 'Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson,' and even to the book of 'Revelation.'