The turn to the transnational in literary studies in the 1980s, propelled by the amplified presence in the West of writers whose roots and sensibilities are more global than local or national, has reshaped critical approaches to the contemporary novel. Prominent today in Britain among such transnational figures is the Scottish-Sierra Leonean Aminatta Forna. She has earned a place in the ‘great tradition’ of novelists distinguished by their intense interest in formal as well as moral complexity. Characterised by the geographical breadth of her subject matter, an elegant narrative style, and a measured concern for the uneven landscapes of justice, ethics, and the changes brought about by the digital circulation of news media and the financial globalisation of national economies, her work consistently engages with the painful histories and unsettling memories of individuals in different parts of the world, individuals who must carry on with ordinary resilience and day-to-day courage in the aftermath of blood feuds and civil strife.

Forna first achieved wide visibility with the success of her second novel, The Memory of Love, winner of the 2011 Writers’ Prize. Born in Glasgow, raised in Sierra Leone and Britain, she also spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand and Zambia. Her first book, The Devil that Danced on the Water (short-listed for the 2003 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction), is a memoir that delves into the death of her dissident father, a physician-politician who was framed, imprisoned, and eventually hanged for treason in Sierra Leone in 1975, when she was only eleven years old. Her first novel, Ancestor Stones (winner of the 2007 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award), is a fictionalised account of her African female ancestors and their quiet stewardship of the land and the past. With her third novel, The Hired Man (2013), she ventured outside her own experience to tackle the outcomes of the 1990s conflict in the Balkans. Forna's insightful, compassionate approach to the troubled histories of disparate regions of Africa and Europe has elicited praise on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2014, she received the Yale University Windham Campbell Prize for her body of work. In just over a decade, her ambitious fiction has earned her a place among the major new literary voices of the twenty-first century.