Maaza Mengiste biography

Maaza Mengiste Biography

Maaza Mengiste was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and lived in Nigeria and Kenya before settling in the United States. Her debut novel, the award-winning Beneath the Lion's Gaze, was selected by The Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books. It has been translated into several languages. Her second novel, The Shadow King will be published in September 2019.

Her fiction and nonfiction writing can be found in The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC Radio 4, Granta, and Lettre International, among other places. She is a Fulbright Scholar with fellowships from the Emily Harvey Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Prague Summer Program, and Yaddo. Mengiste was a Runner-up for the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, as well as 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. She lives in New York City.

Maaza Mengiste's website

This bio was last updated on 04/21/2019. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.