Hovsep Shishmanian (Constantinople/Istanbul 1822 – Tiflis/Tbilisi 1888), Ottoman Armenian educator and historical novelist better known by his pen name Dzerents, lost both parents at a young age and was sent to the Armenian Catholic Mekhitarist Congregation in Venice in 1831. Unlike his classmate, Ghevont Alishan, Shishmanian did not enter the clergy and returned to Constantinople in 1837, where he was apprenticed to a pharmacist and taught in Armenian schools. In 1848, he travelled to Paris to study medicine, earning his medical degree in 1853. During this time, Shishmanian also taught at the Mekhitarist school in Paris, where the future Ottoman Armenian intellectual Madteos Mamourian was among his pupils.

In the 1850s and 1860s, Shishmanian, having returned to Constantinople, worked to create a sense of national unity among Apostolic and Catholic Armenians, whose leadership had been at odds for decades. He also took part in charitable associations that sought to spread education and improve economic conditions among Armenians outside urban centres, particularly in the region of Cilicia. Cilicia was the setting of Shishmanian’s first historical novel, which he began writing while working as a physician in Cyprus in the mid-1870s. Along with Hakob Melik Hakobian (Raffi) and Madteos Mamourian, Shishmanian is one of the few Armenian historical novelists.

Toros Lewoni (“Toros, son of Levon”) was published in 1877. Set in 12th-century Cilicia, during a period of Armenian rule over that region, it relates the struggle of an Armenian prince to resist Byzantine control during the Crusades and to restore Armenian statehood. Shismanian’s second historical novel, Erkunk Innerord Daru (“Travails of the 9th century”, 1879), explores similar themes of national liberation, this time during a 9th-century Armenian revolt against the Abbasid Caliphate. His third and final historical novel, Theodoros Rshtuni, was published in 1881 and is set in the 7th century – yet another period in which Shishmanian situates a drive to establish Armenian statehood. The title character, an Armenian prince, attempts to unite Armenians against Byzantine, Persian and Arab political control. These last two novels were published in the wake of the Russo-Turkish War and the Congress of Berlin, which created independent states out of former Ottoman provinces and stimulated the development of a national liberation ideology among Ottoman Armenian intellectuals.

Shishmanian moved to Russian-governed Tbilisi in 1878, where he taught in an Armenian school. He spent the final decade of his life traveling between Constantinople, Paris and Tbilisi.