Aminatta Forna
Aminatta Forna
Aminatta Fornais a Scottish writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water, and three novels: Ancestor Stones, The Memory of Love and The Hired Man. Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionWriter
interested outside worlds writers
Increasingly, there are those of us who write from outside the center, and those are the writers that I'm most interested in because they bring me into worlds that I did not previously know. And that, as a writer, is what I try to create.
checking ebay sort
I'm at my desk for about 9:30 A.M., and I stay there all day. Then there's a lot of checking Facebook and eBay and that sort of thing.
filling journalist mapping perhaps plot vague
I get a very vague idea and - perhaps because I once was a journalist, or perhaps because that's what made me want to be a journalist - I go off and explore it for a bit, rather than mapping out a plot and then filling in the research.
kinds literal novelist people truths
I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.
drink moves mug particular upset
I don't have very many little fetishes, but the one I do have is that I like a particular mug to drink out of. It's just a small china cup, and I get very upset if my husband moves it.
writers
Most writers I know go for word counts, and I used to be a journalist, so I guess that's ingrained.
assumption coming complete crop hot life owns plantation talking thinks writer wrote
Everyone thinks I have a coffee plantation in Sierra Leone, but I have a cashew crop project. I wrote about a woman who owns a coffee plantation! When you are talking about a woman writer coming from a hot country, there's a complete assumption that she is writing about her own life.
stood-up household
I was brought up in a household where you stood up to be counted.