Imbolo Mbue

Imbolo Mbue is a Cameroonian-American novelist born in Limbe, Cameroon, in 1982. She moved to the United States in 1998 to study at Rutgers University and later received an MBA from Columbia University. Her debut novel Behold the Dreamers (2016) tells the story of a Cameroonian immigrant family in New York City during the 2008 financial crisis, navigating their relationship with a family of Wall Street bankers. The novel was an Oprah's Book Club selection and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2017. Mbue's second novel How Beautiful We Were (2021) is set in a fictional African village whose inhabitants fight back against an American oil company poisoning their land. It was a New York Times notable book and received strong critical praise for its ambition and its portrayal of corporate exploitation in Africa. Mbue's fiction is distinguished by its large-scale moral canvas, its attention to economic and political forces, and its deeply sympathetic portrayal of ordinary people navigating systems of power far beyond their control. She lives in New York City.