|
|
 |
 Dinaw Mengestu
was born in 1978 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. At the age of two, he immigrated to the United States with mother and sister to join his father who had fled the revolution in Ethiopia two years earlier. Mengestu was raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois, where he attended an all-white Catholic high school. “I wanted an identity so badly,” he says. “I was never going to be black enough.” So he started to read about Ethiopia “doing just weird research into the country on my own… to carve and create” something for himself. He developed an attachment to his home country that he deepened over the course of the next ten years.
Mengestu received his B.A. in English from Georgetown University and, while a senior there, he began to conduct interviews with his family members, pressing them to talk about their experiences in Ethiopia. His father’s older brother, Shibrew Stephanos, had been killed during the so-called Red Terror of the 1970s. His father and other relatives were “really moved” to talk about what had happened: “I think most of them hadn’t spoken about it in years.” He was originally thinking of writing a nonfiction account, perhaps something splicing his interviews together with newspaper articles and historical artifacts into something that he describes as a “crazy postmodern narrative.” After earning an M.F.A in fiction from Columbia University, and receiving the 2006 Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, he instead turned his research into his first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, published in 2007.
Praised by the New York Times Book Review as a “great African novel, a great Washington novel and a great American novel,” The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is the winner of many awards including the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction (LA Times), the Guardian’s First Book Award, and the Prix du Premier Rom. It has been named a New York Times Notable Book, and was the Seattle Reads selection for 2008. Mengestu has recently published a firsthand account of the situation in Darfur for Rolling Stone, and has written for Harper’s and Jane Magazines. His second novel, How to Read Air, is forthcoming.
Quotes from Dinaw Mengestu are from an interview with Bob Thompson, published in the Washington Post March 1, 2007.
|
|
|
|
