Baalu Girma (1939 - ?) was one of Ethiopia’s greatest writers and Oromay was his most famous novel. He began his career as a journalist in Ethiopia, eventually becoming both a well-known novelist and a top official in the Ministry of Information under the Derg dictatorship. He based Oromay on the real-life Red Star Campaign, a failed government effort to crush the long-running Eritrean insurgency. Its unflattering portrait of the regime caused the book to be banned and Girma to be fired. He vanished on Valentine's Day 1984, likely kidnapped and murdered by the Derg.
David DeGusta is a writer and translator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He earned an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received the 2023 Henfield Prize, and was a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. Previously, he worked as a paleoanthropologist in Ethiopia.
Mesfin Felleke Yirgu was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with Amharic as his native language. He has been involved with the Baalu Girma Foundation since its founding and is a long-time friend of the Girma family.
