Background

Maaza Mengiste was born in 1971 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and lived in Nigeria and Kenya. When she was four, her family settled in the United States.

Education

Maaza Mengiste studied in Italy as a Fulbright Scholar. Then she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from New York University.

Career

Maaza Mengiste is a novelist and essayist whose work examines the individual lives at stake during migration, war, and exile, and considers the intersections of photography and violence. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2010), is set in Ethiopia in the 1970s and revisits the last days of the Ethiopian monarchy and the brutal beginnings of the Derg, the socialist military junta that replaced it. The story focuses on the Hailu family as they struggle to make difficult choices within a political climate that grows increasingly complex and dangerous.

Her second novel is The Shadow King (2019). It is set in 1935 during Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and tells the story of the Italo-Ethiopian war from both sides of the conflict. It revolves around an army of ordinary women since left out of the historical record, who join the front lines to fight against the fascists. Through complicated characters who face no easy answers, The Shadow King explores what it means to be a woman at war.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, BBC Radio, and Lettre International, among other places. Mengiste was also a writer on the documentary films The Invisible City: Kakuma, about a refugee camp in the middle of the Turkana desert in Kenya that has become the region’s fastest-growing community; and Girl Rising, which tells the stories of nine girls from developing nations around the world overcoming obstacles to education and security. Girl Rising, which features the voices of Meryl Streep, Liam Neeson, and Cate Blanchett, is part of the Girl Rising project, a global action campaign for girls’ education and empowerment.

She is a visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Queens College of the City University of New York and a Lecturer of Creative Writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.

Achievements

• Maaza Mengiste was runner-up for the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a finalist for a Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Image Award, and an Indies Choice Book of the Year Award in Adult Debut. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, 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. It was translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, Dutch, and Swedish. Mengiste is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Creative Capital.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Shadow King

    (With the threat of Mussolini’s army looming, recently orp...)

    2019
  • Beneath the Lion's Gaze

    (This memorable, heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa,...)

    2010

• video

  • Watch Girl Rising

    (Girl Rising commemorates the stories of nine incredible g...)

    2013

Views

E. L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Edith Wharton are among Maaza Mengiste's influences. She is excited by such Ethiopian writers as Nafkote Tamirat, Mik Awake, Meron Hadero, Sulaiman Addonia, Hannah Giorgis, Girma T. Fantaye, Adam Reta, Hiwot Teffera, Mahtem Shiferraw, Rebecca Fisseha, Lelisa Girma, Hiwot Adilow, and Linda Yohannes.

Her playlist includes Mahmoud Ahmed, Ephrem Tamiru, Anne Gastinel, Bonga, Mina, Sviatoslav Richter, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Sarah Vaughan, Rihanna, Chet Baker, Charles Bradley, Nas, Childish Gambino, and others.

Quotations: "What is profound about fiction is that it creates a place where we can imagine the possible futures of these kinds of movements. Those are the kinds of questions we have to ask as writers."

"The attacks on free press and media feel like an urgent signal for writers and journalists to continue to call out injustice and stand together. I find that the atmosphere of fear pervasive in this country has created self-censorship."

"I think a writer’s identity is that of someone who has pledged allegiance to seeking and challenging truths."

"All the poets that were, or the poet that was, Homer. I would ask them to talk to me about how they breathed life into this epic and kept it alive for so long."

"We know the world is more than we can sense or experience in one lifetime; stories help expand our boundaries."

"Regarding World War II, so much of how we understand the contemporary, what it means to be humane, heroic, nationalistic, patriotic, how we define genocide, really arises at that moment in history."

"We must not be anything other than what we are."

"The nature of love is to kill for it, or to die."

"Hope can never come from doing nothing."

Membership

Maaza's activism in human rights shows up in the most various activities and associations - she works in the border of Warscapes, of Words Without Borders and of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights and through her writing she raises awareness on social issues.