Event: Aminatta Forna in Conversation at Oxford University

Aminatta Forna will be in conversation with Elleke Boehmerat, Oxford Professor of World Literature in English, for an event at Oxford University titled “Memoir and Memory.” The conversation will be part of the launch of the 2017-18 Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Series, “Post-War: Commemoration, Reconstruction, Reconciliation.”

Sierra Leonean-Scottish Forna is the author of the Samuel Johnson Prize-shortlisted memoir, The Devil That Danced on Water (2002), and three novels: the Hurston Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction-winning Ancestor Stones (2006), the Orange Prize finalist and Commonwealth Prize-winning The Memory of Love (2010), and the IMPAC Award-nominated The Hired Man (2013).

Winner of the 2014 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, finalist for the 2016 Neustadt Award, and 2017 recipient of the Officer of the British Empire (OBE), Forna is, at the moment, the Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University and Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. In September, she was in conversation with Salman Rushdie.

Here is an excerpt from the announcement.

In this conversation, award-winning novelist and memoirist Aminatta Forna and Elleke Boehmer will discuss the ways in which Ms Forna’s work (which includes her novel The Memory of Love and memoir about Sierra Leone, The Devil That Danced on the Water) have portrayed situations of conflict and post-conflict, and how literature can offer new perspectives on commemoration, reconstruction and reconciliation.

The seminar series is run jointly between the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University.

All are welcome.

Find out how to attend the event HERE.