Awarded $500,000 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant
Twenty-three new MacArthur fellows
were named by the MacArthur Foundation, and on that list is 34-year-old
Ethiopian-born Dinaw Mengestu, author of the novels ‘The Beautiful Things That
Heaven Bears’ and ‘How to Read the Air’.
They will each receive a
no-strings-attached grant of $500,000 over the next five years – widely known
as a “genius” grant – to allow them “unprecedented freedom and opportunity to
reflect, create, and explore”. The fellows were all chosen “for their
creativity, originality and potential to make important contributions in the
future”.
Dinaw Mengestu was awarded his
MacArthur grant for “enriching [the] understanding of the little-explored world
of the African diaspora in America in tales distilled from the experience of
immigrants whose memories are seared by escape from violence in their
homelands”.
Each fellow is told of his or her
grant in a phone call “out of the blue”, Mengestu said that when he received
the phone call about the $500,000 (£310,000) grant, he was in Africa, at a
books festival in Nairobi. “It was obviously amazingly overwhelming and at the
same time felt remarkably appropriate to be there and to be in a community that
I felt I was desperately trying to reach out to”.
“Part of what the MacArthur
fellowship does is remind me that the work I’ve done is relevant – not
necessarily what I write about, but the people who populate my work. That those
people have a significance and meaning that sometimes might be overshadowed or
lost in the larger narrative of the world, and it’s important to keep writing
out of those experiences,” he said.
Previous recipients of MacArthur
awards include The Wire creator David Simon and the novelists Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie, Yiyun Li and Cormac McCarthy, with 873 people picked since the
programme was set up in 1981. The fellows are selected following a series of
formal suggestions by hundreds of anonymous nominators, with a committee of around
12 members – also anonymous – making final recommendations to the foundation.
Robert Gallucci, the president of
the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, said that this year’s 23
fellows “demonstrate the power of creativity”.
“The MacArthur fellowship is not
only a recognition of their impressive past accomplishments but also, more
importantly, an investment in their potential for the future,” he said. “We
believe in their creative instincts and hope the freedom the fellowship
provides will enable them to pursue unfettered their insights and ideas for the
benefit of the world.”
Source: CP-Africa.
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