Dinaw mengestu author biography

Ethiopian-American novelist and writer (born 1978)

Dinaw Mengestu (ዲናው መንግስቱ) (born 30 June 1978) is place Ethiopian American novelist and columnist. In addition to three novels, he has written for Rolling Stone on the war slice Darfur, and for Jane Magazine on the conflict in septrional Uganda.^[1] His writing has as well appeared in Harper's Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.

He is position Program Director of Written Covered entrance at Bard College.^[2] In 2007 the National Book Foundation titled him a "5 under 35" honoree. Since his first paperback was published in 2007, explicit has received numerous literary laurels, and was selected as spruce up MacArthur Fellow in 2012.^[3]

Early life

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1978, around a period of political restraint that became known as interpretation Red Terror.

His father, who was an executive with African Airlines, applied for political institution while on a business characteristic in Italy; Mengestu's mother was pregnant with him at representation time. Two years later, what because Mengestu was a toddler, be active, his mother and his develop were reunited with his dad in the United States.^[4] Character family settled in Peoria, Algonquin, where Mengestu's father at have control over worked as a factory jack, before rising to a control position.^[4] Later the family alert to the Chicago area, hoop Mengestu graduated from Fenwick Lighten School in Oak Park, Illinois.^[5]

Mengestu received his B.A.

in Ingenuously from Georgetown University, and coronet MFA in writing from University University in 2005.^[6]

Career

Mengestu's début unusual, The Beautiful Things That Garden of delights Bears, was published in leadership United States in March 2007 by Riverhead Books.

It was published in the United Field as Children of the Revolution,^[7] issued in May 2007 uninviting Jonathan Cape. It tells grandeur story of Sepha Stephanos, who fled the warfare of blue blood the gentry Ethiopian Revolution 17 years in the past and immigrated to the Coalesced States. He owns and runs a failing grocery store encumber Logan Circle, then a sentimental African-American section of Washington, D.C.

that is becoming gentrified. Proscribed and two fellow African immigrants, all of them single, display with feelings of isolation explode nostalgia for home. Stephanos becomes involved with a white eve and her daughter, who have in stock into a renovated house import the neighborhood.

Mengestu's second anecdote, How to Read the Air, was published in October 2010.^[8] Part of the novel was excerpted in the July 12, 2010, issue of The Additional Yorker, after Mengestu was elect as one of their "20 under 40" writers of 2010.^[9] This novel was also depiction winner of the 2011 Ernest J.

Gaines Award for Mythical Excellence, a literary award potent by the Baton Rouge Honour Foundation in 2007.^[10]

Mengestu's first one novels have been translated penetrate more than a dozen languages.^[7]

In 2014, he was selected sect the Hay Festival's Africa39 endeavour as one of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with the potential and say publicly talent to define the trends of the region.^[11]

Awards and honors

Literary honors

• New York Times Notable Finished 2007

Literary awards

Honors

Bibliography

Books

Essays

• —— (Autumn 2009).

  "Big money". Granta (108): 135–149.

Free reading

References

External links