Maaza Mengiste Wins $800,000 2026 MacArthur Fellowship

Maaza Mengiste, an Ethiopian American writer and professor of English at Wesleyan University, has been named a recipient of the 2026 MacArthur Fellowship. The fellowship awards an unrestricted $800,000 to each of 20 fellows, paid in quarterly installments over five years. The MacArthur Foundation cited Mengiste's fiction for its attention to the human costs of political violence through the interplay of history, memory, and imagination.

Mengiste is the author of Beneath the Lion's Gaze (2010) and The Shadow King (2019). The Shadow King focuses on Ethiopian women who participated in resistance to Italy's 1935 invasion and was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. Her work draws on Ethiopian history to examine political violence, resistance, and memory, and has contributed to expanding conversations about African historical fiction internationally.

How she intends to use the fellowship

Mengiste has discussed plans to allocate part of the grant toward initiatives that promote translation of African literary fiction into English. She also intends to continue developing a database of photographic archives related to the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Those projects aim to make primary materials and translated works more accessible to wider readerships and to support the movement of African literature across languages and borders.

Mengiste is working on a novel set in interwar Berlin that explores the rise of Nazism through the experiences of Black Germans, including figures who served as models for German Expressionist artists. The MacArthur fellowship gives her both financial freedom and resources to advance that project as well as archival and translation initiatives that extend beyond her own writing.

Why this matters for readers of African literature

Mengiste's combined focus on narrative fiction, archival work, and translation addresses multiple stages of how African stories are produced and circulated: the writing itself, preservation of historical materials, and the translation pathways that connect African-language or regionally published works to global readerships. Her stated plans to invest in translation and archival databases could support other writers and scholars working on African history and fiction.

Mengiste with an unrestricted $800,000 award and the freedom to advance a set of creative and infrastructural projects: a new novel about Black Germans in interwar Berlin, an archival photographic database tied to Ethiopia's 1935 invasion, and initiatives to promote translation of African literary fiction into English. Her recognition highlights the continued international interest in historical fiction that centers African experiences of colonialism and resistance.