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Dinaw Mengestu

Biography

Dinaw Mengestu

Dinaw Mengestu is the award-winning author of two novels, THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS (2008) and HOW TO READ THE AIR (2010). He is a graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia University's MFA program in fiction and the recipient of a 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation and a 20 Under 40 Award from The New Yorker. His journalism and fiction have appeared in such publications as Harper's, Granta, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal. He is a recipient of a 2012 MacArthur Foundation genius grant and currently lives in New York City.

Dinaw Mengestu

Books by Dinaw Mengestu

by Dinaw Mengestu - Fiction

Dinaw Mengestu’s new novel is set in the 1970s and alternates between two radically different environments: the violence-torn landscape of Idi Amin’s Uganda, and the bucolic Midwestern college town to which one of the refugees from Kampala immigrates. As in his two earlier novels, Mengestu’s elegiac writing dramatizes the struggles of African exiles trying to conform to American life while grappling with memories of the horrors they witnessed in their home continent.