Ethiopian-American writer Maaza Mengiste has been announced as a recipient of the 2026 MacArthur Fellowship.
Mengiste is one of 20 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists selected for this year’s fellowship and will receive the sum of $800,000 to support her craft.
She received a BA from the University of Michigan in 1993 and an MFA from The New York University in 2007. She was on the faculty of Princeton University and Queens College prior to joining Wesleyan University, where she is currently a professor in the Department of English. She is the author of Of Interest to the General Public: About a Coronation Cloak from Ethiopia (forthcoming February 2027) and editor of Addis Ababa Noir (2019). Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in New York Review of Books, The New York Times, London Review of Books, and Granta.
Mengiste’s writing depicts the moral and personal harms of political conflict in works that render both the intimate textures of individuals’ lives and the broad sweep of historical events unfolding around them. She grounds her novels in extensive research and inhabits multiple historical and fictional voices, offering complex, sometimes competing, accounts of periods of violence in twentieth-century Ethiopia. Her first novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2010), follows a physician and his two sons during the fall of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and the rise of an oppressive military junta. In The Shadow King (2019), she brings to life the little-known history of women resistance fighters during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1935–1941).
Mengiste has been described by the MacArthur Foundation as a fiction writer who reveals “the human costs of political violence through a combination of history, memory, and imagination.” Her novel-in-progress will contemplate the rise of the Nazis from the perspective of Black Germans, including some who served as models for German Expressionist artists.
Commenting on this year’s selection of Fellows, Kristen Mack, Vice President (Communications), MacArthur Fellows and Partnerships, said: “For 45 years, MacArthur Fellows have defied boundaries, by questioning conventions, crossing disciplines, and driving collective progress. The 2026 Fellows continue that creative tradition—they explore the depths of our humanity; they reveal untold origins to modern challenges; they expand the edges of scientific inquiry and life-saving research. They show us new ways to understand the world.“
At the heart of the MacArthur Fellows Programme is its aim to identify extraordinarily creative individuals with a track record of excellence in a field of scholarship or area of practice, who demonstrate the ability to impact society in significant and beneficial ways through their pioneering work or the rigour of their contributions. In keeping with this purpose, the Foundation awards fellowships directly to individuals rather than through institutions. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or individuals in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations.
The Foundation does not require or expect specific products or reports from MacArthur Fellows and does not evaluate recipients’ creativity during the term of the fellowship. The MacArthur Fellowship is a “no-strings-attached” award in support of people, not projects. Each fellowship comes with an award of $800,000 to the recipient, paid out in equal quarterly installments over five years.