Maaza Mengiste

Maaza Mengiste is a novelist, essayist and photographer. Her debut novel, „Beneath the Lion’s Gaze“, was named by the „Guardian“ as one of the ten best contemporary African books. Her novel „The Shadow King“ was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020. Mengiste founded Project3541, a collective memory project about the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935–1941. At the age of four, she fled the Ethiopian Revolution with her parents and spent her childhood in Nigeria, Kenya and the United States.