Aminatta Forna
Sierra LeoneAbout
Aminatta Forna is a Sierra Leonean-Scottish novelist, essayist, and academic, born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1964 and raised in Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom. Her father was a Sierra Leonean doctor and political activist who was executed after being accused of treason. His life and death profoundly influenced her writing, particularly her interest in political violence, memory, and the silences surrounding national history. Her literary works include the memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water (2002), Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013), and Happiness (2018). The Memory of Love won the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna received the Windham-Campbell Prize in 2014 and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2017. She is also a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University and directs the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.
