Encyclopedia entry (3000 words). Ethiopian-born writer Dinaw Mengestu is a twenty-first-century novelist and freelance journalist. The son of refugees, he grew up in the Midwest and since his first visit to Africa in his twenties, he has been publishing essays and magazine articles on Ethiopia and present-day conflicts in Africa. Since 2006, he has produced three award-winning novels in which he portrays a diverse set of characters, African exiles and refugees or their descendants, and tackles the themes of migration, dislocation and loss, diaspora, and the forging of new identities in multicultural America. As a member of the new African diaspora in the USA, he has become a major voice in contemporary multiethnic American literature.