Ethiopian-American wins Guardian First Book Award

In The Guardian overnight where the author pic, below, is also from.

A novel that tackles fraught questions of identity, dislocation and loneliness through the life of an Ethiopian émigré in the US has taken this year's Guardian First Book Award.

Dinaw Mengestu's Children of the Revolution tells the story of Sepha Stephanos, a man who fled to America to escape the violence of Ethiopia's communist revolution after witnessing his father's death at the hands of junta soldiers. Seventeen years later, running a struggling convenience store in a once grand but now dilapidated neighbourhood of Washington DC, Stephanos is still trying to find his place in the new world.

Reviewers have been quick to point out the parallels between Stephanos's life and Mengestu's own. Born in Addis Ababa in 1978, Mengestu was just two years old when he and
his mother and sister followed his father - who had been forced out by the revolution two years earlier - to the US. From there, however, their lives diverge: where Stephanos is trapped by his immigrant status, Mengestu attended
Georgetown University and graduated from Columbia University's MFA program.
His clean, spare sentences and ability to deal with tragedy in a controlled
and meticulous way won the judges' unanimous praise.

The Guardian First Book Award, worth £10,000 to the winning author, is unique among literary prizes in that it is open to all debut writers regardless of genre. Previous winners
have included Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer. Children of the Revolution
was joined on this year's shortlist by two other novels (Tahmima Anam's A
Golden Age and Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost), Rosemary Hill's biography
of the architect Augustus Pugin, God's Architect, and Rajiv Chandrasekaran's
account of the lurid blunders of America in Iraq, Imperial Life in the Emerald
City.

Speaking after the award was presented at a ceremony in central London last night, the Guardian's literary editor and chair of the judging panel Claire Armitstead said that while each
of the shortlisted books had their champions, the economy and power with which
Mengestu depicted the dead-end lives of his characters saw him emerge as the
winner. "Unusually for a first novel, there is no slack in his writing,
no authorial vanity to interfere with his evocation of immigrant life in
21st-century America," she said.

In addition to the Waterstone's reading groups, represented on the panel by Stuart Broom,
Armitstead was joined in the judging by the presenter Mariella Frostrup,
journalist and author Simon Jenkins, Phillippe Sands, QC, the Guardian's
features editor, Katharine Viner, and the novelists Maggie O'Farrell and
Kamila Shamsie. As well as applauding the novel's "beautiful
writing", Shamsie praised the "many different layers of loss in the
book, from the brutal to the barely-glimmering". It is, she said, "a
book of quiet and haunting power, impossible to shake off long after you've
turned the last page."

Mengestu, who is currently living in Paris and writing a second novel set in a small town in the American midwest, accepted the award with visible delight. "It's amazing," he
said. "I'm still stunned".

And here is a review of the title which appeared in The Guardian back in June.