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Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water; four novels, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love, Ancestor Stones, and Happiness; and, most recently, a book of essays, The Window Seat. She is Director of the Lannan Center at Georgetown.  (September 2021)

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A Document of Losses

Véronique Tadjo’s chronicle of the West African Ebola outbreak illuminates the link between disease and environmental destruction.

In the Company of Men

by Véronique Tadjo, translated from the French by the author and John Cullen

September 23, 2021 issue

Obama and Africa’s Renaissance Generation

It came to be a core belief held by the American public and media that Barack Obama was a self-creation who had stepped out of nowhere. But for me, Obama’s story is remarkably familiar and concrete. Our fathers both belonged to the postwar wave of Africans educated in the West who saw themselves as the architects of decolonization. Wole Soyinka called them the “Renaissance Generation.”

November 10, 2018

A Memoir's Afterlife

At one minute past midnight on July 19, 1975, my father was hanged. For twenty-seven years, I told no one about it. Then I published a memoir. I have lived with the aftermath of that decision ever since.

November 13, 2017

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