Maaza Mengiste (born in 1971 in Addis Abeba) is an Ethiopian writer.
In 1974, when Mengiste was four years old, Emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown in a military coup. Among the victims of the revolution were three of Mengiste's maternal uncles. Her family was forced to flee the country, and she grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, Nairobi in Kenya, and in the United States. She has an MFA in creative writing from New York University, and today lives in New York, where she teaches the same subject. Seen as one of the many talented young voices who portray the African continent, she has been nominated to the Pushcart Prize and named a "New Literary Idol" by New York Magazine.
Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion's Gaze, tells the story of a doctor's family in Addis Ababa whose lives are radically changed by the revolution. It is a portrait of how far people are ready to go to achieve freedom, of the human tragedies that follow civil war, and of how feelings are twisted by a brutal regime. The novel received excellent reviews in magazines and newspapers such as The New Yorker, USA Today and New York Magazine.[1] It was the Fiction runner-up in the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.