Maaza Mengiste is one of the most important writers working today. Her novel The Shadow King — shortlisted for the Booker Prize, winner of the LA Times Book Prize, and named book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Time, and others — confirmed her as a writer of rare power and precision. Her debut, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, remains a landmark of contemporary African fiction. Across novels, essays, and photography, her work returns again and again to history’s buried truths: who is remembered, who is erased, and what it costs to look clearly at both.
Maaza is currently a fellow at the American Academy where she is working on her third novel, A Brief Portrait of Small Deaths, set in the city during the interwar period, centred on a Black German woman navigating art, politics, and survival as the Nazis consolidate power. It is a book rooted in this city’s own history, and there is no better place to begin that conversation than here.