Is a novelist, memoirist and essayist. Her novels are Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones. In 2002, she published a memoir of her dissident father and Sierra Leone, The Devil that Danced on the Water. The Window Seat, an essay collection, was published in 2021. She is currently writing an ecological history of the Great African Rift Valley. Aminatta is the winner of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and has been a finalist for, among others, the Neustadt Prize, the Orange Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize, the IMPAC Award and Ondaatje Prize. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Aminatta was made an OBE in the Queen's 2017 New Year's Honours list. Aminatta Forna is Director of the Lannan Center at Georgetown University.