Goddard MFA faculty member Micheline Aharonian Marcom‘s novel Three Apples Fell from Heaven will be adapted by Motorcycle Diaries writer José Rivera and directed by Shekhar Kapur.
This will be the first film from Disruptive Narrative, a new social justice storytelling production  which launched at Cannes as part of the Refugee Voices in Film day. Marcom says, “A Syrian-Armenian refugee will be cast as the lead to play the character based on my grandmother from my novel…a refugee to play a refugee—strange and terrible how we’ve come full circle in a hundred years.”
Marcom’s first book, and the beginning of a trilogy of novels, Three Apples Fell from Heaven , is set in Turkey between 1915–1917 and depicts the Ottoman government’s genocide of the Armenian population. It was named as one of the best books of the year by both The Washington Post  and the Los Angeles Times.  Her second book in the trilogy, The Daydreaming Boy, which earned her a Lannan Literary Fellowship as well as the  PEN/USA Award for Fiction, is centered on a middle-aged survivor of the genocide living in a 1960s Beirut, which itself is facing collapse. The culmination of the trilogy, Draining the Sea, is a fierce critique of America’s complicit involvement in the Guatemalan Civil War. Marcom’s fourth novel, The Mirror in the Well. was published by Dalkey Archive Press.  Her fifth book, A Brief History of Yes, was also published by Dalkey Archive Press.