Maaza Mengiste

Maaza Mengiste is a novelist, essayist, and photographer. She is the author of the novel, The Shadow King, which is shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and was a 2020 LA Times Book Prize Fiction finalist. It was named best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Elle, Time, and more. The Shadow King, called “a brilliant novel…compulsively readable” by Salman Rushdie, is currently available in Spanish, Swedish, French, German, Italian, and Romanian, and is being translated into several other languages.

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. Her story, “Dust, Ash, Flight,” which appeared in Addis Ababa Noir, edited by Maaza, was awarded a 2021 Edgar Award for Best Short Story.

She is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship, a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, the Premio il ponte, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Creative Capital Award. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Granta, theGuardian, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and BBC, among other places.

Maaza served as a judge for the 2016 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing