Maaza Mengiste | |
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 Mengiste, BookExpo 2019 | |
| Born | 1974 (age 49–50) Addis Ababa, Ethiopia |
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| Education | New York University (MFA) |
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| maazamengiste | |
Maaza Mengiste (born 1974) is an Ethiopian-American writer. Her novels include Beneath the Lion's Gaze (2010) and The Shadow King (2019), which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. [1]
Mengiste was born 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. [2] She later studied in Italy as a Fulbright Scholar and earned an MFA degree in creative writing from New York University.
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 (edited by Helon Habila), New Daughters of Africa (edited by Margaret Busby), [3] and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
Mengiste's 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 has been translated into French, Spanish, [4] Portuguese, [5] German, Italian, Dutch, and Swedish. [6] She was runner-up for the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, [7] and a finalist for a Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, [8] 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. [9]
Her second novel, The Shadow King (2019), is set during Mussolini's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, shining a light on the women soldiers not usually credited in African history. [10] [11] [12] 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 (the Ethiopians must rely on outdated and often malfunctioning weapons and have no way of long-distance communication beyond running messengers). They are also set side by side in the modes of consciousness that all the characters experience." [13] 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." [14]
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. [15] Mengiste also serves on the Board of Directors for Words Without Borders. [16]
Alongside Edwidge Danticat and Mona Eltahawy, Mengiste contributed a section to Richard E. Robbins's 2013 documentary film Girl Rising on girls' education around the world for 10x10 Films, with narration by Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Alicia Keys, and Cate Blanchett. [17]
Mengiste is currently a Professor of English at Wesleyan University. [18] Previously, she taught in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Queens College, City University of New York, [19] and in the Creative Writing program at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. [20]
From January to June 2020, Mengiste was "writer in residence" of the Literaturhaus Zurich and the PWG Foundation in Zurich. [21]
Her novel The Shadow King (2019) was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. [22]
In January 2021, Otosirieze Obi-Young profiled her for Open Country Magazine in the cover piece of that quarter's editio of the magazine. The Piece was titled, "Maaza Mengiste is Reframing Ethiopian History." [23]
Kamila Shamsie FRSL is a Pakistani and British writer and novelist who is best known for her award-winning novel Home Fire (2017). Named on Granta magazine's list of 20 best young British writers, Shamsie has been described by The New Indian Express as "a novelist to reckon with and to look forward to." She also writes for publications including The Guardian, New Statesman, Index on Censorship and Prospect, and broadcasts on radio.
Sahle Sellassie Berhane Mariam is an Ethiopian novelist and translator.
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic East Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
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Helon Habila Ngalabak is a Nigerian novelist and poet, whose writing has won many prizes, including the Caine Prize in 2001. He worked as a lecturer and journalist in Nigeria before moving in 2002 to England, where he was a Chevening Scholar at the University of East Anglia, and now teaches creative writing at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.
Dinaw Mengestu is an Ethiopian-American novelist and writer. In addition to three novels, he has written for Rolling Stone on the war in Darfur, and for Jane Magazine on the conflict in northern Uganda. His writing has also appeared in Harper's, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. He is the Program Director of Written Arts at Bard College. In 2007 the National Book Foundation named him a "5 under 35" honoree. Since his first book was published in 2007, he has received numerous literary awards, and was selected as a MacArthur Fellow in 2012.
Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Desertion (2005), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
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Ellah Wakatama, OBE, Hon. FRSL, is the Editor-at-Large at Canongate Books, a senior Research Fellow at Manchester University, and Chair of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. She was the founding Publishing Director of the Indigo Press. A London-based editor and critic, she was on the judging panel of the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award and the 2015 Man Booker Prize. In 2016, she was a Visiting Professor & Global Intercultural Scholar at Goshen College, Indiana, and was the Guest Master for the 2016 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation international journalism fellowship in Cartagena, Colombia. The former deputy editor of Granta magazine, she was the senior editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House and an assistant editor at Penguin. She is series editor of the Kwani? Manuscript Project and the editor of the anthologies Africa39 and Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction.
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Beneath the Lion's Gaze is a 2010 novel by Ethiopian-American writer Maaza Mengiste. It describes a family in Addis Ababa in 1974, living through the transition from emperor Haile Selassie to rule by the Derg. Favorably reviewed, Beneath the Lion's Gaze was a nominee for several prizes.
Aida Edemariam is an Ethiopian-Canadian journalist based in the UK, who has worked in New York, Toronto and London. She was formerly deputy review and books editor of the Canadian National Post, and is now a senior feature writer and editor at The Guardian in the UK. She lives in Oxford. Her memoir about her Ethiopian grandmother, The Wife's Tale: A Personal History, won the Ondaatje Prize in 2019.
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The Shadow King is a 2019 novel by Ethiopian-American writer Maaza Mengiste, published by W. W. Norton & Company on September 24, 2019. It was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.
Afterlives is a 2020 work of historical fiction by the Nobel Prize-winning Zanjibar-born British author Abdulrazak Gurnah. It was first published by Bloomsbury Publishing on 17 September 2020. Set mainly in the first half of the 20th century, the plot follows four protagonists living in an unnamed town on the Swahili coast of what is now Tanzania from the time of German colonial rule until a few years after independence. In April 2021, the novel was longlisted for the Orwell Prize of Political Fiction.
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Quotations related to Maaza Mengiste at Wikiquote
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