Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Great Britain, and spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand and Zambia.

She is the award-winning author of novels The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and a memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water. Her most recent novel is Happiness. Her books have been translated into 18 languages.

Aminatta is the recipient of a Windham Campbell Award, has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and been a finalist for the Neustadt Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction.

In 2003, she established the Rogbonko Project to build a school in a village in Sierra Leone. The charity has run a number of projects involving adult education, sanitation and maternal health.

Aminatta is currently Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.