Aminatta Forna
Aminatta Forna is an award-winning author and journalist whose lyrical, inventive and memorable narratives have received international acclaim. She’s coming to Port Eliot to present Where Stories Come From, telling us about the main characters in her books and sharing the secret of where the ’spark of life’ for each character came from and how they evolved into a person on the page.
Glasgow born, Aminatta was raised in Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom. Her first book The Devil that Danced on the Water (2002), is a memoir of her dissident father’s trial and execution for treason in Sierra Leone and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2003, serialised on BBC Radio, appeared in The Sunday Times and was selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers series.
Her award-winning first novel, Ancestor Stones (2006) won the Hurston Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction, was nominated for the International Dublin IMPAC Award and was the 2008 winner of the Liberaturpreis in Germany. It was also a New York Times Editor’s Choice book, was selected by the Washington Post as one of the Best Novels of 2006 and one of The Listener Magazine’s Best 10 Books of 2006.
Her second novel The Memory of Love (2010) is a story about friendship, war and obsessive love set in an African city.
In 2007 Aminatta was named by Vanity Fair as one of Africa’s most promising new writers. She’s on the advisory committees of the Royal Literary Fund and the Caine Prize for African Writing. Her television credits include the BBC arts documentary Through African Eyes, the Channel 4 documentary series Africa Unmasked and the BBC’s, The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu (2009). She has written for Granta, The Economist, The Sunday Times, The Observer, Vanity Fair and Vogue Magazine.
www.aminattaforna.com
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“A wonderfully ambitious novel written from the inside, opening up a particular society and delving deeply into the hearts, histories and minds of women.”
The Guardian
“Aminatta Forna tackles those great human experiences of love and war, of friendship, rivalry, of death and triumphant survival.”
Kiran Desai
Links:
- Interview with Aminatta Forna in The Independent
- Interview with Aminatta Forna in The Interview Online discussing The Memory of Love
Video: Interview with Aminatta Forna on BBC World Service
