Meron Hadero is an Ethiopian-American writer. Born in the city of Addis Ababa, Hadero immigrated to Germany and, later, the United States. She attended Princeton University and received a BA in history with a certificate in American studies. She also holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and a JD from Yale Law School. She also served as a research analyst for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Hadero's work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Zyzzyva, Addis Ababa Noir, and 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology. She has received the Yaddo, Ragdale, and MacDowell fellowships and was a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. Her first story collection, A Down Home Meal For These Difficult Times, was published in 2022 by Restless Books. It won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing and was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Hadero described her work in the following way: "From the point of view of the writer, it was a way for me to[...] kind of deconstruct this idea of displacement and think about it through the lens of different voices and through the lens of different experiences. And I can only hope that, for a reader, they also have the opportunity to do that, and a reader would be able to see this as an idea with many different points of entry, and hopefully some speak to them."
A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times is a short story collection by Ethiopian writer Meron Hadero, first published in 2022. The stories in the collection detail various lives of African immigrants in America.
The stories tackle different...
