5 Under 35

The National Book Foundation recently announced their list of 5 authors under the age of 35 that will be recognized at a celebration on November 12th.

According to the site,

These five writers have each been selected by a previous National Book Award Finalist or Winner as someone whose work is particularly promising and exciting and is among the best of a new generation of writers.

It’s a great list, but I’m especially glad to see Dinaw Mengestu on here. He’s a great person, and definitely deserving of all the accolades he’s been receiving.

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980, he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled the communist revolution in Ethiopia two years before. A graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction, as well as the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Mengestu has written for Rolling Stone and Harper’s, among other publications. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, his first novel, has been nominated for the Guardian First Book Award in the U.K. and the Prix Femina Etranger in France, and was called “a great African novel, a great Washington novel, and a great American novel” by the New York Times. He lives in New York City.