Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland and raised in West Africa and the UK. Her most recently published novel The Memory of Love (April 2010), is winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Book Award, nominated for the Orange Prize and short-listed for the Warwick Prize.

Her first book The Devil that Danced on the Water, a memoir of her dissident father and of Sierra Leone, was runner-up for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2003 and BBC Book of the Week. Her novel Ancestor Stones was winner of the 2008 Hurston Wright Legacy Award, the Liberaturpreis in Germany, was nominated for the International IMPAC Award and selected by the Washington Post as one of the most important books of 2006. In 2007 Vanity Fair named Aminatta as one of Africa's most promising new writers.