Maaza Mengiste

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), the latter of which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. 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. 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, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4.