Please join writer and novelist Aminatta Forna for a discussion of her writing and work in the UK and Sierra Leone on Monday, January 31, at 3pm in WAG 101, and a reading/signing of her new novel The Memory of Love Monday, January 31, at 7pm at Book People.

Both events free and open to the public

Aminatta Forna was born in Glasgow and raised in Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom. She is the award-winning author of The Memory of Love, Ancestor Stones (2006) and The Devil that Danced on the Water (2002).

Her new novel The Memory of Love (Bloomsbury/Atlantic Grove), published in April 2010, is a story about friendship, war and obsessive love in post-conflict Sierra Leone. It has been selected as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times and the London Times.

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, chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers series and serialised on BBC Radio and in The Sunday Times newspaper. Ancestor Stones was a New York Times Editor’s Choice book, selected by the Washington Post as one of the Best Novels of 2006.

In 2002 Aminatta helped to build a primary school in her family’s village of Rogbonko. The building of the school was the first step in what would become known as the Rogbonko Project: a community effort to create an escape route from poverty through multiple initiatives in the spheres of education, agriculture, infrastructure and health.