Mengestu, pictured here with Gaines, has published two works of fiction, and numerous works on nonfiction. Photo courtesy Baton Rouge Area Foundation

Dinaw Mengestu has already received considerable critical acclaim during his brief tenure as “A Novelist.” So far, he’s won a number of awards and honors, from the Guardian First Book Award, the National Book Award, the Lannan Fiction Fellowship, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, The New Yorker’s “20 under 40,” and the New York Times’ Notable Book Award.

Last week, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation named Mengestu as the fifth recipient of the esteemed Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence during a ceremony held at the Manship Theatre. It is another feather for Mengestu to add to his hat, and includes a comfy $10,000 grant for writing.

Mengestu, who has published two novels, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007) and How to Read the Air (2012), was born in Addis, Ethiopia, was raised in Peoria, Ill., and has been writing (and thinking) about Africa, it seems, his entire life. After attending Georgetown and Columbia Universities, Mengestu worked as a journalist covering conflicts in Africa for Rolling Stone, Jane Magazine, and other publications. In the past five years, Mengestu has turned his pen toward fiction, publishing two novels that center on Americans struggling to understand African roots.

Dig spoke with Mengestu when he was in town for the award ceremony last week.

Dig: Ernest J. Gaines is considered a pioneer novelist. What does he mean to you?

Dinaw Mengestu: Probably in high school, when I was first forging a more full identity for myself, when I was growing up in the Midwest in an all-white high school, it was Ernest Gaines, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. [They] definitely were some of the most important writers to me at that time. They validated my sense of what was possible in my own life, and within my own story as well – learning that you could actually write about people and places that you knew, and those works could be beautiful.

Dig: You are well known for your fiction, but you have quite a body of nonfiction work also. Where does your interest in journalism come from?

DM: I’ve had a really strong political bent to my personality for quite a long time. The journalism is part of that and, of course, my own fiction writing. It’s a way of experiencing what you end up imagining – it’s to be able to report on it directly, with real characters and real people and real narratives that aren’t just part of my imagination, but part of my experience, and to try to do so in a way that felt responsible.

Dig: A lot of that journalism came out of your experiences in Africa – why?

DM: All of the journalism I do centers around conflicts in Africa. Part of the reason why I chose that is because I think a lot of the stories are poorly represented. They’re oftentimes reduced to very tidy, structural clichés of ethnicity and violence, and that always overlooks the larger political reality, which is necessary to understanding why violence – or any life, period – exists in any country. The politics determine the shape and the future of a country. Most of the time you see those stories in terms of ethnicity or religion, and doing those stories for me is always a way to kind of add another voice, another perspective that argues for a more complicated reality.

Dig: With Sudan, for example, we Americans got a warped perspective of the conflict?

DM: You get the story in Darfur of Arab elites killing black Muslims or black Africans, and that’s really not, by any means, the cause of the conflict. [The conflict is the result of] an exploitation of the public by the government in Khartoum, who decided to arm one group over another, creating that ethnic tension.

Dig: Your interest in adding perspective to these conflicts – does that stem from your parents’ experience fleeing Ethiopia?

DM: Definitely a large part of it was. I remember growing up my father was very frustrated when we came to America, because everyone would assume that we came here because of the famine – because no one knew that there was a war going on at the same time, and the civil war made the famine even more possible. That was the reason people were fleeing. No one understood Ethiopia as being a communist country that was going through a communist revolution – the story here was always, ‘Here’s a famine, and we have to stop it.’

Dig: How do you reconcile “the truth” in journalism with “the universal truth” in fiction?

DM: One thing about fiction is that you have a lot more space than when you are a journalist. With fiction, you create a character with as much particularity as you possible can. And it’s in that particularity that you are able to get to that universal moment that is inside literature and inside art. You’ve managed to create a character who is from this particular village, ethnicity, or whatever, and you give them as much human life as possible. Those universal truths are that you allow people to see somebody different from themselves as also somebody who is capable of love, somebody who has a fear of death, somebody who is capable of enormous acts of graciousness, and at the same time possible cruelty. It’s that complexity of human identity that you can explore.

In journalism, the same thing is possible. You’re still trying to get people to feel the characters you’re writing about in as much complexity as possible. And the truth is, in that complexity, nobody you write about is ever going to meet you, no situation is ever black and white, and you’re always kind of searching for the truth and the complications.

Dig: What’s your writing process like? Do you map out novels?

DM: No map. It’s like you begin because there’s a sentence, or a particular image that strikes you, and that happens sometimes and you realize that – after four days of work – that there’s nothing there. And then the novels are the ones that a year later you’re still working on, and you’ll always be anxious for quite a while that there will be enough behind a particular image to sustain a book. I have no idea where the book is going. It’s a daily act, as I write.

Dig: Your two novels both center around African-Americans, and in an interview in 2010, you mentioned that your third novel is the final component to this African Diaspora cycle. Did you come to any conclusion or resolution to the issues you bring up in your novels?

DM: I don’t know – I don’t think I’m fully conscious of it. You write the first book because that was the kind of voice in your head that day when you began the novel, and it took over. The second book, it was only then that I realized that these two worlds were intimately connected in my head, and the third novel I had already began before the second book was finished. I do think that this next part is like another chapter, another voice of not only Africa, but also America as well, and how these two places are connected and tied to these characters.

It wasn’t until I was 100 pages into this next book that I realized it was still part of the same dialogue.