Maaza Mengiste

Maaza Mengiste is a novelist and essayist who was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was selected by the Guardian as one of the ten best contemporary African books and named one of the best books of 2010 by Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, and other publications. Her second novel, The Shadow King, was published in September 2019. Mengiste’s work can be found in the media outlets such The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Granta, the Guardian, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and BBC. In her introduction to the anthology Addis Ababa Noir (Akashic Noir) Mengiste sets the scene thusly: ” What marks life in Addis Ababa are the starkly different realities coexisting in one place. It’s a growing city taking shape beneath the fraught weight of history, myth, and memory. It is a heady mix. It can also be disorienting, and it is in this space that the stories of Addis Ababa Noir reside. […] No single book can contain all of the wonderful, intriguing, vexing complexities of Addis Ababa. But what you will read are stories by some of Ethiopia’s most talented writers living in the country and abroad.” Kirkus Reviews noted that “Mengiste presents 14 stories showcasing Ethiopia’s capital at its darkest…A nice variety of bad behavior. East, West: Noir’s best.”