Professor Aminatta Forna is Director of the Lannan Center.
She is the award-winning author of the novels Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, a memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water, also an essay collection, The Window Seat.
Aminatta’s books have been translated into more than twenty two languages. Her essays have appeared in many publications including Freeman’s, Granta, The Guardian, LitHub, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Observer and Vogue. She has written stories for BBC radio and written and presented television documentaries including “The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu” (BBC Television, 2009) and “Girl Rising” (CNN, 2013).
Professor Forna is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Folio Academy. She has acted as judge for the Giller Prize, Samuel Johnson Prize, the Bailey Prize for Women’s Fiction, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Caine Prize and the International Man Booker Prize.
She is the recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University and a Lannan Fellowship, and has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award 2011, a Hurston Wright Legacy Award the Liberaturpreis in Germany and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize. She has been a finalist for the Neustadt Prize for Literature, the Bailie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, the Women's Prize for Fiction, the IMPAC Award and the Warwick Prize. Aminatta Forna was made OBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours 2017
Academic Appointment(s)
- Primary
- Professor of the Practice, College - Department of English