Aminatta Forna is an author, broadcaster and journalist. She was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Britain, and spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand and Zambia. She is the award-winning author of the novels Happiness (2018); The Hired Man (2014); The Memory of Love (2010); and Ancestor Stones (2006). Forna won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award 2011, the PEN Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Liberaturpreis in Germany, and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, as well as being shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna established the Rogbonko Project to build a school in a Sierra Leone village. The charity now runs a number of projects in the spheres of education, sanitation and maternal health.
Forna is currently a Lannan Visiting Chair at Georgetown University. She has acted as judge for a number of literary awards and was most recently a judge for the 2013 International Man Booker Prize.
