Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna (2008)

Aminatta Forna , OBE (born 1964 in Glasgow , Scotland ) is a British writer.

Life

Aminatta Forna was born in Glasgow in 1964. Her father Mohamed Forna was from Sierra Leone and her mother Maureen Christison was from Scotland. When she was six months old, the family moved to Sierra Leone. Her mother divorced in 1970. Forna lived with her two siblings and her father and stepmother in Sierra Leone. In 1975 her father was executed in Sierra Leone for treason .

Forna studied law at University College London and then at the University of California, Berkeley . From 1989 to 1999 Forna worked as a journalist for the BBC . She made documentaries on topics from culture and politics.

Aminatta Forna lives in London and is married to designer Simon Westcott.

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In her first novel, The Devil that Danced on the Water , she tells the story of her father. Ancestor Stones was published in 2006 and tells the story of four African women. In 2011 she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize with the novel The Memory of Love . Aminatta Forna was nominated for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature 2016.

Works (selection)

• The Devil that Danced on the Water . Grove Press, New York 2002, ISBN 0-8021-4048-3 .
  • Dance with the devil: my African childhood . Translated by Bea Reiter, Bertelsmann Verlag, Rheda-Wiedenbrück / Gütersloh 2003.
• Ancestor Stones. Atlantic Monthly Press, New York 2006, ISBN 0-87113-944-8 .
  • Abie's stones . Translated by Sabine Schwenk. Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-8270-0735-3 .
• The Memory of Love . Bloomsbury, London 2010, ISBN 978-1-408-80424-7 .
  • A song from the past . Translated by Giovanni Bandini and Ditte Bandini. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-421-04522-5 .
• The Hired Man . Bloomsbury, 2013 ISBN 978-1-4088-1877-0
• Happiness . Atlantic Monthly, 2018 ISBN 978-0-8021-2755-6

Awards

• 2008: LiBeraturpreis for Abie's stones
• 2011: Commonwealth Writers' Prize for The Memory of Love
• 2014: Windham – Campbell Literature Prize in the Fiction category.
• 2017: Officer of the Order of the British Empire
• 2019: Inclusion in the New Daughters of Africa anthology by Margaret Busby

Web links

• Literature by and about Aminatta Forna in the catalog of the German National Library
• Aminatta Forna in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Aminatta Forna , website
• Aminatta Forna , at Marabout
• Aminatta Forna: don't judge a book by its author , theguardian.com , February 13, 2015

Individual evidence

1. ↑ international literature festival berlin 2008: Aminatta Forna. Retrieved February 19, 2013 . 
2. ↑ Deutschlandradio Kultur: Four women, one family. Retrieved February 19, 2013 (Reviewed by Barbara Wahlster). 
3. ^ Finalists Announced for the 24th Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Lyrikzeitung.com, May 27, 2015, accessed June 3, 2015 . 
4. ↑ Reading group: Aminatta Forna receives LiBeraturpreis for her debut “Abies Steine”. Retrieved February 19, 2013 .