If you have been following Maaza Mengiste’s work, you already know that she is one of the most important African novelists writing today. Born in Addis Ababa, Mengiste left Ethiopia at the age of four when her family fled the Ethiopian Revolution and spent her childhood across Nigeria, Kenya, and the United States, a biography that has shaped her into a writer preoccupied with the lives of the displaced, the erased, and the forgotten. Her writing focuses on the lives of ordinary people amid social and political upheaval, and the intersections of photography, gender, and war. On April 27, 2026, she will take the stage at the Deutsche-Amerikanisches Institut in Nürnberg for a lecture hosted by the American Academy in Berlin, where she is currently a fellow.

The talk, titled From the Archives and Fragments of History: A Novelist’s Journey from Fact to Fiction, promises to be a rare window into Mengiste’s creative and research process. She’ll speak about the archival and photographic material that shaped her two novels, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (W.W. Norton, 2010), named among the ten best contemporary African books by the Guardian, and The Shadow King (W.W. Norton, 2019), a Booker Prize finalist named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, Time, and others. She will also offer glimpses into her current work in progress. Set primarily in 1930s Berlin, A Brief Portrait of Small Deaths reimagines the lives of some of the city’s marginalized populations (African, Arab, Asian, Jewish, and others) as the Nazis came to power, and the alliances they formed for survival.

For those who’ve ever wondered how a novelist converts a photograph or a fragment from an archive into fully inhabited fictional lives, this is the conversation to hear. The event takes place at 6:00 PM at DAI Nürnberg, Gleißbühlstr. 9. Registration is required, write to [email protected] to secure your spot.