Dinaw Mengestu

Carrie Dawson (Dalhousie University)

Ed. by John Edward Masterson, University of Sussex
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 8.2.3: Anglophone African Writing and Culture: Subsaharan.
Vol. editors: Helen Rachel Cousins (Birmingham Newman University), David Firth (University of Manchester), Alex Nelungo Wanjala (University of Nairobi)

Dates

Born 1987
Activity 2007-ongoing

Places

Born in Ethiopia
Active in United States

Activities

Primary

Novelist

Resources

Mengestu's Works

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Dinaw Mengestu is an Ethiopian-American novelist and journalist. He has reported on the recent conflicts in Congo, Uganda and Sudan for

Granta

Rolling Stone

, and

Harper’s

. As a novelist, Mengestu has garnered a number of prominent awards and established himself as a leading international writer in a relatively short time. In 2007,

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

(published as

Children of the Revolution

in the United Kingdom) won the Guardian First Book Award. That same year Mengestu was recognized by the National Book Award Foundation with the “5 Under 35 Award”. Following the publication of his second novel,

How to Read the Air

, in 2010,

The New Yorker

selected Mengestu as one of their “20 under 40” writers, and two years later he received a prestigious MacArthur…

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2023 words

Citation: Dawson, Carrie. "Dinaw Mengestu". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 July 2015 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13416, accessed 22 November 2024.]