Dinaw Mengestu is the author of four novels—Someone Like Us (2024), All Our Names (2014), How to Read the Air (2010), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007)— each of which was named a New York Times notable book. He was chosen as a MacArthur Fellow and has received a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, National Book Foundation 5-Under-35 Award, Guardian First-Book Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and he recently was chosen by the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center to deliver the 2025 Cheuse Lecture.

His articles and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta and Rolling Stone. As a journalist, Dinaw has reported on life in Darfur, Northern Uganda and eastern Congo. Dinaw is himself a native of Ethiopia who immigrated to the US with his parents when he was two years old.

In this episode of Upstart Crow, Dinaw talks with host William Miller in a wide-ranging conversation about the ways his own life story inform his fiction, how his work has developed over the years he has written, and the significance of many of the elements within each of the four novels.

"Lives are rarely good or bad. You know, we don't live in binaries. But what he is able to do is accept that he is here... and to kind of let go of this impossible return. That ability to accept—'this is my life'—still feels pretty profound to me."

— Dinaw Mengestu

The Power of Absence: Mengestu explores how silence and absence—especially of country, culture, and family—shape identity and narrative, allowing readers to feel the haunting spaces between what’s said and unsaid.

Immigrant Narratives Reimagined: His characters wrestle with displacement, the myth of return, and the trauma of migration, often facing the complex reality of accepting a new life while holding onto a lost one.

Violence and Perspective: Dinaw examines political and personal violence, not through spectacle but through subtlety—what is implied, withheld, and felt across generations.

#DinawMengestu #ImmigrantStories #UpstartCrowPodcast

Connect with Dinaw on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dinaw_mengestu/

Find out more about his books and where you can purchase them here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/170308/dinaw-mengestu/

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