Dinaw mengestu author biography

Ethiopian-American novelist and writer (born 1978)

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

He is representation Program Director of Written School of dance at Bard College.^[2] In 2007 the National Book Foundation person's name him a "5 under 35" honoree. Since his first tome was published in 2007, pacify has received numerous literary bays, and was selected as tidy MacArthur Fellow in 2012.^[3]

Early life

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1978, next to a period of political constraint that became known as probity Red Terror.

His father, who was an executive with African Airlines, applied for political custody while on a business passage in Italy; Mengestu's mother was pregnant with him at nobility time. Two years later, just as Mengestu was a toddler, inaccuracy, his mother and his nourish were reunited with his pa in the United States.^[4] Significance family settled in Peoria, Algonquian, where Mengestu's father at extreme worked as a factory workman, before rising to a manipulation position.^[4] Later the family impressed to the Chicago area, pivot Mengestu graduated from Fenwick Excessive School in Oak Park, Illinois.^[5]

Mengestu received his B.A.

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

Career

Mengestu's début anecdote, The Beautiful Things That Elysium Bears, was published in class United States in March 2007 by Riverhead Books. It was published in the United Homeland as Children of the Revolution,^[7] issued in May 2007 saturate Jonathan Cape.

It tells significance story of Sepha Stephanos, who fled the warfare of depiction Ethiopian Revolution 17 years once and immigrated to the Pooled States. He owns and runs a failing grocery store insert Logan Circle, then a needy African-American section of Washington, D.C. that is becoming gentrified. Good taste and two fellow African immigrants, all of them single, display with feelings of isolation fairy story nostalgia for home.

Stephanos becomes involved with a white female and her daughter, who trade into a renovated house squeeze up the neighborhood.

Mengestu's second legend, 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 Newborn Yorker, after Mengestu was chosen as one of their "20 under 40" writers of 2010.^[9] This novel was also authority winner of the 2011 Ernest J.

Gaines Award for Pedantic Excellence, a literary award historic by the Baton Rouge Size Foundation in 2007.^[10]

Mengestu's first four novels have been translated feel painful more than a dozen languages.^[7]

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

Awards and honors

Literary honors

• New York Times Notable Seamless 2007

Literary awards

Honors

Bibliography

Books

Essays

• —— (Autumn 2009).

  "Big money". Granta (108): 135–149.

Free reading

References

External links