Aminatta Forna was born in Glasgow and raised in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Her first book, The Devil that Danced on the Water, is a memoir of her dissident father and Sierra Leone. Her award-winning novel Ancestor Stones was selected by The Washington Post as one of the most important books of 2006. Her new novel The Memory of Love (Bloomsbury, April 2010) is a story about friendship, war and obsessive love. It won Best Book (Africa) in the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Forna is a trustee of the Royal Literary Fund and sits on the advisory committee of the Caine Prize for African Writing. She has also written for television and radio, including the arts documentary “Through African Eyes” (BBC), the documentary series “Africa Unmasked” (Channel 4) and in 2009, “The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu” (BBC). Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Sunday Times, The Observer and Vogue. She lives in London with her husband.