Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna is an award-winning novelist, memoirist and essayist. She was born in Scotland and raised between Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom, as well as spending periods of her childhood in Iran and Thailand.

Her novels are The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stone. In 2002 she published a memoir of her dissident father and Sierra Leone, The Devil that Danced on the Water. Aminatta holds the post of Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University and is also Associate Director of the Transnational Writing Programme at Bath Spa University.

Aminatta has acted as judge for several major literary awards including the International Man Booker 2013 and the Sunday Times Short Story Award 2015. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has served on the Board of the National Theatre of Great Britain, on the Advisory Committees of the Royal Literary Fund, the Caine Prize for African Writing.