Maaza Mengiste
“The stories that we tell ourselves, the stories that families pass down to each other about the people who have been lost or the indignities they have suffered as a result of conflict, those stories can help shape a reality that says we know what can be lost, let’s try to do everything that we can to avoid war.”
“Lyrical, remarkable.”
“Capacious.… adopts the register of myth to shape an epic of nationhood and resistance.”
“Stunning.… [Mengiste] produced a work of fiction that is epic in reach, with brilliant borrowings from the forms of classic tragedy.… The book is impossible to put down or put out of mind.”
“Revolutionary Ethiopia in the seventies is the searing backdrop for Maaza Mengiste’s incandescent debut…the acutely observed story of a family—a prominent doctor and his sons, one moderate, one mutinous—undone by war.”
“The real marvel of this tender novel is its coiled plotting, in which coincidence manages to evoke the colossal emotional toll of the revolution.”
Maaza Mengiste is a novelist, essayist, and photographer. She is the author of the novel, The Shadow King ( W.W. Norton & Co, 2020), which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and was a 2020 LA Times Book Prize Fiction finalist. It was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Elle, Time, and more. The Shadow King, called “a brilliant novel…compulsively readable” by Salman Rushdie, is currently available in Spanish, Swedish, French, German, Italian, Romanian, Turkish, and Finnish, with more translations forthcoming.
Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze ( (W. W. Norton & Co, 2010), was selected by the Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books and named one of the best books of 2010 by Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, and other publications. Her story, “Dust, Ash, Flight,” which appeared in Addis Ababa Noir, edited by Maaza, was awarded a 2021 Edgar Award for Best Short Story.
She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship, a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, the Premio von Rezzori, the Premio il ponte, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Creative Capital Award. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Granta, the Guardian, The New York Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and BBC, among other places.
In an interview with the Booker Prize, she was asked about The Shadow King and the ways in which it illustrates the experience of war from a female perspective, and what inspired her to bring these stories to light: “These women and girls stepped forward out of the shadows and made themselves known, they refused to be ignored any longer. Is recognition a form of inspiration? Because I recognised them as soon as I encountered them in a stray line or in faded photographs. It wasn’t inspiration as much as a familiarity, an “Oh, there you are,” when I didn’t even know that I had been searching for them. I often said I wrote this book surrounded by ghosts, I could feel them rise up at certain moments, demanding their turn to speak. To become remembered, to be ushered into the rooms of the honoured. Is this inspiration? I folded into their demands and they were often angry and relentless and perhaps this, too, is what inspiration means: this channeling of energies not your own in an attempt to steady the ground beneath you, to right a skewed part of the world as we know it. I wrote with a fury that was theirs. Perhaps this, too, is inspiration.”
Born in Ethiopia, she was raised in Nigeria, Kenya, and the United States. She is a Fulbright Scholar and a graduate of the MFA program at New York University. She teaches at Wesleyan University and lives in New York City.
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© Nina Subin
© Nina Subin
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
