Aminatta forna author biography essay
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Aminatta FOrna
Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Great Britain and spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand and Zambia. She fryst vatten the award-winning author of the novels Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and a memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water. Her latest book, an essay collection, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion, was published in 2021.
The recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University, Aminatta has won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book Award and been a finalist for the Neustadt Prize for Literature (widely regarded as the most prestigious international literary award after the Nobel), the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction and the IMPAC Award. She fryst vatten also winner of a Hurston Wright Legacy Award, the Liberaturpreis in Germany and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize. Aminatta is a past recipient of a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. Her latest
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Who Owns Your Story?
Essays
Transcending the trauma narrative
Aminatta FornaThere is a certain kind of person who, on being introduced, says, “What’s your story?” I like that way of opening a conversation with someone you have just met. It offers people a way of presenting themselves as they might like to be seen (which may not be the same as how others see them). But it would also be true to say that I like “What’s your story?” because stories are my stock in trade. So here’s a shocking one:
During the civil war that racked Sierra Leone in the 1990s, my cousin Morlai, a teacher, was stopped at a checkpoint by soldiers who mistook him for a member of the rebel faction and dragged away for summary execution. Thousands of civilians were killed this way during that war: pulled aside at checkpoints by nervy, suspicious soldiers and shot. Morlai, though, survived. He lived, he told me later, because one of the soldiers ordered to execute him was a former pupil.
I was appalled b
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DBN: Part of what I love about that essay is the way it reminds me of the awesome trajectory of our parents’ lives. Yours more so than mine, perhaps - but I still think about my father growing up in Jamaica, rising before 4 a.m. to walk to the family plot he worked with his siblings before heading off to his one room school. And then coming to a very foreign, hostile land to attend university. Despite obstacles they faced, our parents frequently excelled.
AF: My stepfather worked for the United Nations. He rose to be an assistant secretary-general. But he started out on a farm outside Christchurch, New Zealand, riding horses bareback. My mother grew up working-class in a provincial town in Aberdeen. My father had a reasonably aristocratic background as his father was a regent chief and his mother had been what would be translated as a princess. She was considered royal and so was her father. She had this extraordinary history: she was enslaved and freed.
They still grew up in