Book Club: A Look At ‘The Shadow King’ With Author Maaza Mengiste

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4.7 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2020

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

While researching for her novel, author Maaza Mengiste says she came across a New York Times article from 1935 that described a woman leading an army of 2,000 men into victory. She was shocked. Why had she never heard about this female wartime hero?

“It struck me,” Mengiste tells Nerdette. “If there’s one, there’s two. If there’s two, there’s five.”

We talk to Mengiste about her novel, The Shadow King, which is the Nerdette Book Club’s September pick. Listen to this spoiler-free convo, then come back later this month for a not-spoiler-free panel discussion.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This fall, W bez invites you to our upcoming live events.
0:05.0	Join us in person for smart discussions, heartfelt storytelling, and more.
0:09.0	Check out the full calendar now at W be easy.org slash events.
0:15.0	From W be easy Chicago I'm Greta Johnson and this is the
0:21.2	Nerd Out Book Club which is just like a regular book club, except every once in a while, the author happens to stop by, and today is one of those days.
0:29.0	Our September book is called The Shadow King. It's by Maza Mungiste and it's a novel about
0:35.6	underdogs and uprisings and the importance of hope. The backdrop is a super important event in Ethiopian history.
0:45.0	Back in 1935, the fascist Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini decided he wanted to colonize an African country. At the time, Italy had one of the most
0:56.3	advanced armies in the world, and Ethiopia did not. But somehow, after years of brutal fighting against all odds, Ethiopia finally drove out the Italians.
1:09.4	Maza was born in Ethiopia, which means the story is super familiar to her.
1:14.0	If you can imagine the stories that I grew up with it it nurtured my vision of what it means to be
1:22.0	Ethiopian what it means to be Ethiopian, what it means to be African.
1:25.8	In Ethiopia, this was a story that everybody talks about.
1:30.1	You know, my grandfather's generation, my great-grandparents generation there would be
1:34.9	people that would come visit us and they were usually identified with oh so-and-so
1:40.0	fought in this battle so-and-so had this person and they're related to and they were in this war. So I grew up with this but I didn't realize until I really started researching this book that there was a whole other side of this history that I knew nothing about.
1:58.0	Turns out a lot of women helped win this war as badass lady soldiers.
2:06.0	So today I'm going to talk with Maza about what she loves about Ethiopia and how hard it
2:11.0	was to find these stories and about the power of women's fury.
2:15.6	Mazaa, welcome to Nurdett.
2:18.0	Oh, thank you, Greta, it's wonderful to be here.
2:21.0	So the story of Ethiopia defending itself from invasion obviously it's a
	...

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