In addition to three novels, he has written for Rolling Stone on the war in Darfur, and for Jane Magazine on the conflict in northern Uganda.

His father, who was an executive with Ethiopian Airlines, applied for political asylum while on a business trip in Italy; Mengestu's mother was pregnant with him at the time.

[4] Later the family moved to the Chicago area, where Mengestu graduated from Fenwick High School in Oak Park, Illinois.

[6] Mengestu's début novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, was published in the United States in March 2007 by Riverhead Books.

[7] In 2014, he was selected for the Hay Festival's Africa39 project as one of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with the potential and the talent to define the trends of the region.