Woman Crush Wednesday: Aminatta Forna
Aminatta Forna, OBE is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, 'The Devil That Danced on the Water', and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010),The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018).
Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College in Massachusetts.
She is currently Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
On 7 March 2014, Forna was announced as the recipient of the 2014 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (Fiction).
In 2015 Forna was part of the judging panel which awarded the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award to Yiyun Li.
The finalists for the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature were announced in May 2015. The list included Forna and writers, poets and playwrights from around the world. The majority of the finalists were women writers.
Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Forna was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to literature.
Forna is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, sits on the advisory committee for the Royal Literary Fund and the Caine Prize for African Writing, has been a judge on several high-profile prize panels, including the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and continues to champion the work of up-and-coming diverse authors.
Forna's work, both fiction and non-fiction, is typically concerned with the prelude and aftermath to war, memory, the conflict between private narratives and official histories, and examines how the gradual accretion of small, seemingly insignificant acts of betrayal find expression in full-scale horror. In her fiction she employs multiple voices and shifting timelines.
We celebrate Aminatta Forna as our Woman Crush Wednesday for her outstanding contribution to literature with fiction that exposes the plight of women in society.
Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College in Massachusetts.
She is currently Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
In 2015 Forna was part of the judging panel which awarded the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award to Yiyun Li.
The finalists for the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature were announced in May 2015. The list included Forna and writers, poets and playwrights from around the world. The majority of the finalists were women writers.
Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Forna was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to literature.
Forna is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, sits on the advisory committee for the Royal Literary Fund and the Caine Prize for African Writing, has been a judge on several high-profile prize panels, including the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and continues to champion the work of up-and-coming diverse authors.
Forna's work, both fiction and non-fiction, is typically concerned with the prelude and aftermath to war, memory, the conflict between private narratives and official histories, and examines how the gradual accretion of small, seemingly insignificant acts of betrayal find expression in full-scale horror. In her fiction she employs multiple voices and shifting timelines.
We celebrate Aminatta Forna as our Woman Crush Wednesday for her outstanding contribution to literature with fiction that exposes the plight of women in society.
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