Maaza Mengiste


Maaza Mengiste is an Ethiopian-American writer and author of the novels Beneath the Lion's Gaze and The Shadow King.

Early life

Mengiste was born in 1974 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, but left the country at the age of four when her family fled the Ethiopian Revolution. She spent the rest of her childhood in Nigeria, Kenya, and the United States. She later studied in Italy as a Fulbright Scholar and earned an MFA degree in creative writing from New York University.

Career

Mengiste has published fiction and nonfiction dealing with migration, the Ethiopian revolution, and the plight of sub-Saharan immigrants arriving in Europe. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Granta, Lettre Internationale, Enkare Review, Callaloo, The Granta Anthology of the African Short Story, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
Her 2010 debut novel Beneath the Lion's Gaze – the story of a family struggling to survive the tumultuous and bloody years of the Ethiopian Revolution – was named one of the 10 best contemporary African books by The Guardian and translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, Dutch, and Swedish. She was runner-up for the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a finalist for a Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, an NAACP Image Award, and an Indies Choice Book of the Year Award in Adult Debut. In 2013 she was World Literature Today’s Puterbaugh Fellow. She counts among her influences E. L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Edith Wharton.
Her second novel, The Shadow King, is set during Mussolini's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, shining a light on the women soldiers not usually credited in African history. Alex Clark in The Guardian said of it: "It is both a reasonably conventional narrative – there is plenty of action, detailed description and a focus spread between the principal characters – and a subtly unpredictable one. History and modernity are juxtaposed in the factual asymmetries of warfare. They are also set side by side in the modes of consciousness that all the characters experience." Michael Schaub of NPR wrote: "The importance of memory — of those that came before us, and of things we'd rather forget — is at the heart of The Shadow King.... The star of the novel, however, is Mengiste's gorgeous writing, which makes The Shadow King nearly impossible to put down. Mengiste has a real gift for language; her writing is powerful but never florid, gripping the reader and refusing to let go. And this, combined with her excellent sense of pacing, makes the book one of the most beautiful novels of the year. It's a brave, stunning call for the world to remember all who we've lost to senseless violence."
Mengiste has also been involved in human rights work. She serves on the advisory board of Warscapes, an independent online magazine that highlights current conflicts across the world, and is affiliated with the Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights. Mengiste also serves on the Board of Directors for Words without Borders.
Alongside Edwidge Danticat and Mona Eltahawy, Mengiste contributed a section to Richard E. Robbins's 2013 documentary film Girl Rising on girl's education around the world for 10x10 Films, with narration by Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Alicia Keys, and Cate Blanchett.
Mengiste teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Queens College, City University of New York, and was a lecturer in Creative Writing at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.
From January to June 2020, Mengiste is "writer in residence" of the and the in Zurich.

Awards, honors, and nominations

Books