Maaza Mengiste

From January to June 2020, Mengiste is "writer in residence" of the Literaturhaus Zurich [de] and the PWG Foundation [de] in Zurich.

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 has published fiction and nonfiction dealing with migration, the Ethiopian revolution, and the plight of sub-Saharan immigrants arriving in Europe. 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. 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. 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.

Maaza Mengiste (born 1974) is an Ethiopian-American writer and author of the novels Beneath the Lion's Gaze (2010) and The Shadow King (2019).

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.