Speaker Series: Aminatta Forna on The Power of Storytelling

Aminatta Forna

Award-winning author of several novels and the essay collection, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion

Aminatta Forna is an award winning writer. Through fiction and non-fiction she has examined the effects of war and trauma. Formerly a journalist for BBC TV, her first book, The Devil that Danced on the Water, was an investigation into the murder of her father, a political activist and Amnesty Prisoner of Conscience, in Sierra Leone in the 1970’s. There followed three novels, including the multi award winning and bestselling The Memory of Love. A firm believer in the resilience of the human spirit, Aminatta’s last novel is titled, Happiness.

Born in Scotland to a Scottish mother and West African father, Aminatta’s childhood was spent moving between worlds and even included spells in Iran and Thailand.  She first came to the United States as a Harkness Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley in 1996. Aminatta is widely traveled and her boundary-crossing life provides the context for her understanding of history, culture and politics. Her adventures are the subject of her most recent book, an essay collection, The Window Seat. 

The recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University, Aminatta has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award, the Hurston Wright Legacy Award, the Liberaturpreis in Germany and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize and been a finalist for the Neustadt Prize for Literature (widely regarded as the most prestigious international literary award after the Nobel).

Aminatta has written and presented television documentaries including “The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu” (BBC Television, 2009) and “Girl Rising” (CNN, 2013). She is a frequent contributor to BBC radio arts and current affairs programs.

Her essays have appeared in Freeman’s, Granta, The Guardian, LitHub, The Nation, The New York Review of Books and Vogue.