Aminatta Forna
Sierra Leone/ UK
Aminatta Forna is the award-winning author of the novels Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and a memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water. Her latest book, an essay collection, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion, was published in 2021. The recipient of a Windham Campbell Award, Aminatta has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award and been a finalist for the Neustadt Prize for Literature, the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the IMPAC Award. She is also winner of a Hurston Wright Legacy Award, the Liberaturpreis in Germany and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize. Aminatta has acted as judge for the The International Man Booker, the Giller Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and the Caine Prize. Currently Aminatta holds the position of Director of the Lannan Center at Georgetown University and is a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. To date Aminatta’s books have been translated into twenty-two languages.
(source: author's page)
What you can't miss:
An elegantly rendered, thought-provoking collection of new and previously published essays. In this wide-ranging collection, Forna writes intimately about displacement, trauma and memory, love, and how we coexist and encroach on the non-human world.
Reviews:
In this delicate yet powerful novel of loves lost and new, of past griefs and of the hidden side of a multicultural metropolis, Aminatta Forna asks us to consider the values of the society we live in, our co-existence with one another and all living creatures—and the true nature of happiness.
Reviews:
Beyond the boundaries of the town Gost, in Croatia, an old house which has lain empty for years is showing signs of life. Laura and her teenage children have arrived. A short distance away lies the hut of Duro Kolak who lives alone with his two hunting dogs. As he helps Laura with repairs to the old house they uncover a mosaic beneath the ruined plaster and, in the rising heat of summer Grace, Laura’s daughter, painstakingly restores it. But Gost is not all it seems; conflicts long past still suppurate beneath the scars.
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An African city, where a dying man Elias Cole, reflects on a past obsession: Saffia, the woman he loved, and Julius, her charismatic, unpredictable husband. Arriving in the wake of war Adrian Lockheart is a psychologist new to this foreign land, struggling with its secrets and the intensity of the heat, dust and dirt, until he finds friendship in Kai Mansaray, a young colleague at the hospital. All three lives will collide in a story about friendship, love, war, about understanding the indelible effects of the past and the nature of obsessive love.
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Abie has followed the arc of a letter from London back to Africa, to the plantation formerly owned by her grandfather. It is a place she remembers from childhood and which now belongs to her—if she wants it. Stretching across generations and set against the backdrop of a country’s descent into freefall, this is a stunning novel about understanding the past and how stories ancient and new shape who we’ve become, and one which offers a different way of seeing the world we share. It is the story of a nation, a family and four women’s attempts quietly to alter the course of their own destiny.
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An evening in 1974 when she was ten years old, Aminatta Forna opened the door to two men, members of the state secret police, come to take her father. A year later he was killed.
The Devil that Danced on the Water is Aminatta’s search for the truth of her father’s fate, moving and terrifying in turns, always compelling, it traces events leading to the moment of his arrest. And what happened after he was taken away.
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