Lika (Anzhelika) Zakaryan was born in 1994 in Stepanakert, the capital of Artsakh. She studied at the Department of Political Science of Artsakh State University and holds a master's degree. She then graduated from the Peace Work Institute, where she studied in-depth conflict management and peace-building methods.  In 2018-2019 she worked at the Montesori School in Würzburg, Germany, as a coach on conflicts and peace-building. Returning to Artsakh, she started working for the Armenian media outlet CivilNet, in the team working for Artsakh. During the war, she started to keep and post her diary, in which she wrote about the war and the people caught up in it. The diary became widely read and loved by people around the world, and remains a definitive chronicle of those forty-four days.