Dinaw Mengestu

Mengestu's début novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, was published in the United States in March 2007 by Penguin Riverhead. It tells the story of Sepha Stephanos, who fled the warfare of the Ethiopian Revolution seventeen years before and immigrated to the United States. He owns and runs a failing grocery store in Logan Circle, then a poor African-American section of Washington, D.C. that is becoming gentrified. He and two fellow African immigrants, all of them single, deal with feelings of isolation and nostalgia for home. Stephanos becomes involved with a white woman and her daughter, who move into a renovated house in the neighborhood.

The novel was published in the United Kingdom as Children of the Revolution in May 2007 by Jonathan Cape. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Mengestu's second novel, How to Read the Air, was published in October 2010. Part of the novel was excerpted in the July 12, 2010, issue of The New Yorker, after Mengestu was selected as one of their "20 under 40" writers of 2010. This novel was also the winner of the 2011 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. This literary award was established in 2007 by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation.

In 2014, he was selected for the Hay Festival's Africa39 project as one of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with the potential and the talent to define the trends of the region.