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 the novels Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones. She has also written a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, and an essay collection, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion. 

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Folio Academy, she has also acted as judge for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Bailey Prize for Women’s Fiction, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Caine Prize and the Giller Prize.

The recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University, Forna has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award 2011, a Hurston Wright Legacy Award, the Liberaturpreis in Germany and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize. She has also been a finalist for the Neustadt Prize for Literature, the Orange Prize for Fiction, the IMPAC Award and the Warwick Prize.

Forna is Director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Happiness was short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize, the Jhalak Prize, and nominated for the European Prize for Fiction.