Mher Brutyan

I’m Mher Brutyan, originally from Armenia. I was born and raised there, lived for a while in Ukraine, and have now been living in Amsterdam for about seventeen years. I came here as a refugee, and after some time I started acting in different cities around the Netherlands, taking on small projects here and there.

I’ve loved theatre since I was six years old, but for a long time I thought I’d never be able to do it again in a new country. That changed when I was accepted to the Amsterdam University of the Arts to study Mime. During this study I not only learned more about acting and physical awareness, but I also discovered something that completely changed me — automatic writing. In one of our classes, we were asked to write for twenty minutes without stopping, without shame, without editing. That was the moment I fell in love with writing.

I eventually decided to graduate not in the traditional way, but with an essay that became a poetry collection inspired by mime. After receiving warm feedback, I tried to publish it — and to my surprise, a publisher said yes. That moment felt unreal, and since then I haven’t stopped writing, exploring new opportunities, and finding new audiences to share my words with.

As someone who speaks five languages, my inspiration comes from many places: Russian literature, Armenian songs, and Ukrainian writing, as well as films and art from all those cultures. In the Netherlands, Sarah Ringoet has been one of my biggest inspirations — she was also my teacher, and the first time I read her poems, I realized I wanted to write in a completely different way than I knew before. My work is often inspired by her style, as well as by the humor and rawness of Lyndsay Rush’s A Bit Much, and the fearless, queer freedom of Ivo Dimchev’s words.

Writing has become another stage for me — one that lives on paper, but always starts in the body.