As a late teenager he abandoned his mother and siblings and set off with his best friend to join one of the armed rebel groups.
Set in the period 1960 to 1990, it tells the tale of a small village in eastern Ethiopia struggling to maintain its identity and heritage as the modern world encroaches on its isolation.
[3] Shortly after Mezlekia's award win for Notes from the Hyena's Belly, poet and editor Anne Stone alleged that she had ghostwritten all but the final 20 pages of the book.
While Mezlekia acknowledged that as a non-native speaker of English he needed some assistance in ensuring that his ideas made it to the page in correct English, he responded that the book was fundamentally his own and that Stone's role in the book's publication was strictly that of a copy editor, and sued Stone for defamation.
[4] The resulting controversy led to considerable debate in the Canadian press, with most critics acknowledging that it can be extremely difficult to clearly determine how much of a role an editor can take in shaping a text before they should properly be credited as a coauthor.