Aminatta FOrna

Articles & Essays

• "An Exile Revisits the Squalor and Grandeur of 1960s Italy," The New York Times, 2024
• "A mind-shifting journey among the sandstone monoliths of Chad's Ennedi Massif," Condé Nast Traveller, 2024
• "The Road to the Country by Chigozie Obioma review — a brutal journey," The Guardian, 2024
• "What Fiction Can Reveal About the Fragile Fabric of Our Societies," LitHub, 2024
• "Prelude to Empire," (a review of Abdulrazak Gurnah's novels), The New York Review, 2023
• "'Just Fade to White, Dear.' Aminatta Forna Remembers Faye Weldon," LitHub, 2023
• "Who Owns Your Story? Transcending the Trauma Narrative," The Yale Review, 2022
• "Where There Is No Hospital," Orion Magazine, 2022
• "A Document of Losses: Véronique Tadjo's chronicle of the West African Ebola outbreak illuminates the link between disease and environmental destruction," The New York Review, 2021
• "Chasing a Waking Life: On the Pains of Being an Insomniac," LitHub, 2021
• "Love, hate, and hypocrisy: The best books about animals and humans," The Guardian, Dec 2018
• "Obama and the Legacy of Africa's Renaissance Generation," New York Review of Books, Nov 2018
• "Power Walking,", LitHub, 2018
• "The Truth About Fiction vs. Nonfiction," LitHub, 2018
• "Wilder Things: Modern Life Among the Foxes and Coyotes," LitHub, 2018
• "The Many Ways in Which the Heart Can Break," LitHub, 2018
• "The Afterlife of a Memoir," The New York Review of Books, Nov 2017
• "Selective Empathy: Stories and the Power of Narrative," World Literature Today, Nov 2017
• "The First Time I Saw Ice Was in the Jungle," LitHub
• "We must take back our stories and reverse the gaze — Writers of African heritage must resist the attempts of others to define us and our history," The Guardian, Feb 2017
• "Your nationalism can't contain me," The Nation, Aug 2016
• "Where are the West's Political Novelists?", Literary Hub, May 2015
• "Aminatta Forna: don't judge a book by its author," The Guardian, Feb 2015
• "Ebola is sweeping in fast—it's now just three miles from my village," The Sunday Times, Oct 2014
• "Ebola: amid the west's hysteria, the real heroes are forgotten," The Guardian, Aug 2014
• "Notes from the Author," National Geographic Traveller
• "1979," Granta, Fall 2013
• "Nadine Gordimer helped me see how fiction writing can illuminate reality," The Guardian, Aug 2013
• "The Museum of Heartbreak," The Economist/Intelligent Life, May/Jun 2013
• "My Big Idea," Harper's Bazaar, 26 Mar 2013
• "The Spark of Life: Where Novels Come From," The Kwani? Manuscript Project, 2012
• "Now Charles Taylor is gone, Sierra Leone is on the rise," The Guardian, April 2012
• "My travels: Aminatta Forna in Sierra Leone," The Guardian, May 2011
• "The Last Vet," Granta Magazine, January 2010 (Interview)
• "The Renaissance Generation," BBC Radio documentary, December 2009
• "The Inauguration of Barack Obama,", BBC World Service, January 2009
• "If international justice is to do more than allay western guilt, it must make sure that such atrocities do not happen again," Guardian Unlimited commentary, 4 Jul 2006
• "Under African Skies," The Observer, 3 Jul 2005
• "About last night," The Guardian UK, May 2004
• "African narratives," The Economist 21 Dec-3 Jan 2003 (Full article requires subscription)
• "The puppet master's strings," Guardian Unlimited commentary, 17 Oct 2002