Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a British writer of Scottish and Sierra Leonean ancestry.

Dr. Forna had become more deeply involved in politics and entered government after the country achieved independence in 1961, serving as finance minister and working to aid developing countries.

He resigned after becoming discouraged by what he said was a growth in political violence and corruption.

But political tensions were rising and he was arrested by the secret police.

Aminatta Forna was born c. 1965 in Bellshill, Lanarkshire, Scotland, near Glasgow; the third child of her parents Mohamed Sorie Forna, a Sierra Leonean who had completed his medical training in Scotland and had a practice, and his wife Maureen Christison, who is Scottish.

When Forna was six months old, the family travelled to Sierra Leone, where they lived while Dr. Forna worked in Freetown as a physician and government finance minister.

With her family, the girl Aminatta lived in nine homes during six years, also spending time as a child in Iran, Thailand and Zambia.

Her parents divorced and her mother remarried, returning to the UK.

After their father gained custody and returned with them to Sierra Leone, the children saw little of their mother.

He was imprisoned between 1970 and 1973; Amnesty International designated him as a Prisoner of Conscience.

In 1975 Dr. Forna was executed by hanging, on charges of treason.

Dr. Forna had married again in Sierra Leone, and the children called their stepmother 'Auntie Yabome.' As conspiracy endangered Dr. Forna, Yabome smuggled the children from Freetown to England, and made a life for them there.

Ten years old when her father was killed, Aminatta Forna finished school in England and studied law at University College London.

Between 1989 and 1999, Forna worked for the BBC, both in radio and television.

She worked as a reporter and also made documentaries in the spheres of arts and politics.

She is known for her Africa documentaries: Through African Eyes (1995), the first of which she made at the BBC.

Her first book was a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest (2002).

Others include Africa Unmasked (2002) and The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu (2009), also made for BBC.

Since then she has written four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018).

In 2021 she published a collection of essays, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion. (2021), which was a new genre for her.

She has been widely praised and received numerous awards, in addition to being nominated for others.

Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

She was the Sterling Brown ’22 Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College in Massachusetts.

Since 2012 she has been Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

In 2013 she assumed a post as Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

Forna is a board member of the Royal National Theatre and was a judge for The Man Booker International Prize 2013.

Forna founded The Rogbonko Village Project, a charity begun as an initiative to build a school in a village in Sierra Leone.

Forna is married to Simon Westcott, a furniture designer.

As of 2013, they lived in south-east London.

In 2021 she published a collection of essays, She said in an interview that she had been encouraged by her time at Georgetown University, as there was considerable interest in the United States in the essay form.

Forna's work, both fiction and non-fiction, is concerned with the prelude and aftermath to war, memory, and the conflict between private narratives and official histories.

She explores how the gradual accretion of small, seemingly insignificant acts of betrayal find expression in full-scale horror.

Forna was among eight writers from seven countries to win the 2014 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (fiction).

Forna was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to literature.

Forna is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and sits on the advisory committee for the Royal Literary Fund and the Caine Prize for African Writing.

She has served as a judge on several high-profile prize panels, including the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

She continues to champion the work of up-and-coming diverse authors.

In March 2019, Forna's Happiness was shortlisted for the European Literature Prize.

In April 2019 it was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) Ondaatje Prize and for the Jhalak Prize