SAVE THE DATE!
Acclaimed Author Aminatta Forna to speak at Writers Guild event
Saturday, November 15, 2025
7pm
Monroe County Public Library Auditorium
Reception/book sales/book signing next door at the Monroe County History Center after the talk
Thanks to our sponsors!
Monroe County Public Library
Psi Iota Xi
Indiana University Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies
Indiana University Department of American Studies
IU Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society
The Book Corner
Monroe County History Center
Aminatta Forna is an award winning writer. Through fiction and non-fiction she has examined the effects of war and trauma. Formerly a journalist for BBC TV, her first book, The Devil that Danced on the Water, was an investigation into the murder of her father, a political activist and Amnesty Prisoner of Conscience, in Sierra Leone in the 1970's. There followed three novels, including the multi award winning and bestselling The Memory of Love. A firm believer in the resilience of the human spirit, Aminatta's last novel is titled, Happiness.
Born in Scotland to a Scottish mother and West African father, Aminatta's childhood was spent moving between worlds and even included spells in Iran and Thailand. She first came to the United States as a Harkness Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley in 1996. Aminatta is widely traveled and her boundary-crossing life provides the context for her understanding of history, culture and politics. Her adventures are the subject of her most recent book, an essay collection, The Window Seat.
Exclusively represented by BrightSight Speakers, Aminatta is Director the Lannan Center at Georgetown University, holds a professorship at Bath Spa University in the UK and previously held the post of Sterling Brown Visiting Professor at Williams College, Massachusetts.
The recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University, Aminatta has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award, the Hurston Wright Legacy Award, the Liberaturpreis in Germany and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize and been a finalist for the Neustadt Prize for Literature (widely regarded as the most prestigious international literary award after the Nobel).
Aminatta has been a keynote speaker at the universities of Columbia, New York, Yale, Georgetown, Kennesaw and Vassar and Macalester colleges, as well at literary festival in Stockholm, Vienna, Johannesburg and The Hague.
Aminatta has written and presented television documentaries including “The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu” (BBC Television, 2009) and “Girl Rising” (CNN, 2013). She is a frequent contributor to BBC radio arts and current affairs programs.
Her essays have appeared in Freeman’s, Granta, The Guardian, LitHub, The Nation, The New York Review of Books and Vogue.
Aminatta Forna is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was made OBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours 2017.
Aminatta is represented exclusively by the BrightSight Group
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