Zabel Yesayan (Armenian: Զապել Եսայան (reformed), Զապէլ Եսայեան (classical); 4 February 1878 – 1943) was an Armenian writer and a prominent figure in the Armenian academic and political community during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Zabel Yesayan's books, articles, and speeches cover a range of topics such as the Adana massacre, Armenian genocide, and commentary on the status of Armenian women. Yesayan also worked as a translator in France as well as a professor during her later years as an academic. Her novels and articles contributed to understanding the persecution of Turkish Armenians, the after effect of World War I, and women's roles and rights in the Ottoman and Armenian communities.

Zabel Hovannessian, daughter of Mkrtich Hovannessian, was born on the night of February 4, 1878, in the Silahdar neighborhood of Scutari, Istanbul, during the height of the Russo-Turkish War. She attended Holy Cross (Ս. Խաչ) elementary school and graduated in 1892.

In 1895 she was among the first women from Istanbul to study abroad, moving to Paris, where she studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne University in Paris, France. Inspired by the French Romantic movement and the nineteenth-century revival of Armenian literature in the Western Armenian dialect, she began what would become a prolific writing career. Her work also contributed to the Armenian intellectual movement called Zartonk (the awakening), along with other female authors such as Srpuhi Dussap and Zabel Asatur (Sibyl).

While in Paris, she married the painter Dikran Yesayan (1874-1921). They had two children, Sophie and Hrant. After the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, Yesayan returned to Istanbul. In 1909, Yesayan was appointed to the Armenian Constantinople Patriarchate's Commission and sent to Cilicia to examine the situation. Yesayan published a series of articles in connection with the Adana massacres. The tragic fate of the Armenians in Cilicia is also the subject of her book In the Ruins (Աւերակներու մէջ, Istanbul 1911), the novella The Curse (1911), and the short stories "Safieh" (1911), and "The New Bride" (1911).

Attacks on Armenians in Ottoman Turkey during World War I left Yesayan's life in peril. She was the only woman on the list of Armenian intellectuals targeted for arrest and deportation by the Ottoman Young Turk government on April 24, 1915.

Yesayan evaded arrest and fled to Bulgaria and later to Baku and the Caucasus, where she worked with Armenian refugees documenting their eyewitness accounts of atrocities that had taken place during the Armenian genocide. Yesayan's son stayed with her mother in Constantinople while her husband and daughter were in France. Yesayan would be reunited with her family in France in 1919 after the war. After WWI, she went back to Cilicia with her children to help Armenian refugees and orphans.

Yesayan visited Soviet Armenia in 1926 and shortly thereafter published her impressions in Prometheus Unchained (Պրոմէթէոս ազատագրուած, Marseilles, 1928). In 1933 she decided to settle permanently in Soviet Armenia with her children, and in 1934 she took part in the first Soviet Writers' Union congress in Moscow. She taught French and Armenian literature at Yerevan State University and continued to write prolifically.