J. Donald Feagin Visiting Artist Aminatta Forna will visit The University of Tulsa on Thursday, October 4 at 7 p.m. where she will give a reading from her latest novel Happiness, recently selected as a Best Book of 2018 by the Washington Post.
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 is 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.
Forna’s books have been translated into 18 languages. Her essays have appeared in Freeman’s, Granta, The Guardian, LitHub, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Observer and Vogue. She has written stories for BBC radio and written and presented television documentaries including The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu (BBC Television, 2009) and Girl Rising (CNN, 2013).
Forna is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Folio Academy. She has acted as judge for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Bailey Prize for Women’s Fiction, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Caine Prize and the International Man Booker Prize.