Khachik Dashtents was born in a shepherd's family. After the Armenian Genocide he moved to Yerevan and finished the Yerevan State University (1932), and then the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages. Dashtents is an author of poetry collections ("Songbook," 1932; "Spring Songs," 1934; "Fire," 1936), "Tigran The Great" a historical drama (1947), translations from William Shakespeare, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Saroyan. The "Khodedan" (1950) and "Call of Plowmen" (published posthumously, in 1979) novels tell the tragic story of Western Armenians during World War I.