Dinaw Mengestu

Dinaw Mengestu (; born 30 June 1978) is an Ethiopian American novelist and writer. In addition to four novels, he has written for Rolling Stone on the war in Darfur, and for Jane Magazine on the conflict in northern Uganda. His writing has also appeared in Harper's Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications.

He is the Program Director of Written Arts at Bard College. In 2007 the National Book Foundation named him a "5 under 35" honoree. Since his first book was published in 2007, he has received numerous literary awards, and was selected as a MacArthur Fellow in 2012.

Early life Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1978, during a period of political repression that became known as the Red Terror. His father, who was an executive with Ethiopian Airlines, applied for political asylum while on a business trip in Italy; Mengestu's mother was pregnant with him at the time. Two years later, when Mengestu was a toddler, he, his mother and his sister were reunited with his father in the United States. The family settled in Peoria, Illinois, where Mengestu's father at first worked as a factory laborer, before rising to a management position.

Mengestu received his B.A. in English from Georgetown University, and his MFA in writing from Columbia University in 2005.

Career Mengestu's début novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, was published in the United States in March 2007 by Riverhead Books. It was published in the United Kingdom as Children of the Revolution, issued in May 2007 by Jonathan Cape. It tells the story of Sepha Stephanos, who fled the warfare of the Ethiopian Revolution 17 years before and immigrated to the United States. He owns and runs a failing grocery store in Logan Circle, then a poor African-American section of Washington, D.C. that was becoming gentrified. He and two fellow African immigrants, all of them single, deal with feelings of isolation and nostalgia for home. Stephanos becomes involved with a white woman and her young daughter, who move into a renovated house in the neighborhood.

Mengestu's second novel, How to Read the Air, was published in October 2010. Part of the novel was excerpted in the July 12, 2010, issue of The New Yorker, after Mengestu was selected as one of their "20 under 40" writers of 2010. This novel was the winner of the 2011 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, a literary award established by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation in 2007.

Mengestu's first two novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

In 2016, Mengestu became a board trustee at PEN America. In December 2025, he was elected to a two-year term as president of PEN America and chair of its board of trustees. In July 2026, Mengestu resigned from his position as the president of PEN America in protest of a controversial report on boycotts targeting Jewish and Israeli authors. In a statement posted to his Instagram, Mengestu wrote that his departure was due to "PEN America’s ongoing failure to defend free expression fairly and equitably, and about its production of work that supports suppression through bigotry and indifference."

Awards and honors

Literary honors New York Times Notable Book 2007

Literary awards Year Book Award Category ResultRef 2007 The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle Roman Guardian First Book Award — Prix du Premier Roman Étranger Prix Femina étranger — 2008 Dylan Thomas Prize — Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction Young Lions Fiction Award — 2011 How to Read the Air Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence — — Vilcek Prize Creative Promise in Literature

Honors The New Yorker "20 Under 40", 2010 Lannan Fiction Fellowship, 2007 National Book Award Foundation, 5 Under 35 Award, 2007 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, 2012