In 1941 she became a member of the Writers Union of Armenia. She made her literary debut in the early 1930s and published her first poem in 1933. She joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1945. She attended the Faculty of Armenian Philology Yerevan State University from 1936 and graduated in 1941, and subsequently studied at the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Soviet Academy of Sciences from 1949 to 1950. She was raised by her mother and grandmother. Her father, Barunak, was a member of the nationalist Dashnaktsutyun party and died of cholera three months before her birth. Born Sirvard Kaputikyan on 20 January 1919 to parents from the historically Armenian-populated city of Van (in the historic Western Armenia, present-day Turkey), she was raised in Yerevan, the capital city of Armenia.
