The Penguin Speakers Bureau

Dinaw Mengestu’s debut novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears earned him comparisons to Bellow, Fitzgerald, and Naipaul, and garnered ecstatic critical praise for its haunting depiction of the immigrant experience in America. His highly anticipated How to Read the Air will be released this fall. In the novel, Mengestu enriches the themes that defined his debut as he follows two generations of an immigrant family.

Mengestu was given a highly coveted spot on the New Yorker “20 under 40” Writers to Watch list and selected as a winner of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” Award, the 2008 Lannan Literary Fellowship, The Guardian First Book Award in the U.K., and France’s Prix du Premier Roman Etranger. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2007, one of Amazon.com’s top ten novels of the year, and Lire Magazine’s Twenty Best Novels of the Year.

Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, said of Mengestu’s novel, “I was profoundly moved by this tale of an Ethiopian immigrant’s search for acceptance, peace, and identity.”

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980, he immigrated to the United States. A graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction, and the recipient of the 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Mengestu has written for Rolling Stone, among other publications.