Author Maaza Mengiste has been named a 2026 MacArthur Fellow and awarded a no-strings-attached $800,000 grant. She is one of 21 MacArthur Fellows selected this year, with the fellowships recognizing individuals for exceptional creativity and providing unrestricted funding to support their work.

Maaza is currently a Professor of English at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where she has been teaching creative writing since 2023. She is described as a successful author whose work focuses on war, memory, Ethiopia and the transmission of trauma across generations. Her second novel, The Shadow King, that brings to life the history of women resistance fighters during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, was a finalist for the 2020 Booker Prize.

The MacArthur Foundation describes Maaza as a “fiction writer revealing the human costs of political violence through a compelling blend of history, memory, and imagination.” Her first novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (Norton & Company, 2010), follows a physician and his two sons during the fall of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and the rise of an oppressive military junta.

Maaza Mengiste’s forthcoming novel, A Brief Portrait of Small Deaths (Doubleday), is set in interwar Berlin and explores the rise of the Nazis from the perspective of Black Germans, including people who served as models for German Expressionist artists, according to Wesleyan University.

Maaza received a BA from the University of Michigan and an MFA (2007) from New York University. Prior to Wesleyan, Mengiste was on the faculty of Princeton University and Queens College. She is also editor of Addis Ababa Noir (2019).