Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Britain, and spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand, and Zambia. She is the award-winning author of the novels The Hired Man, The Memory of Love, and Ancestor Stones, and a memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water. She is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University and in 2013 held the post of Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College, Massachusetts. In March 2014 she received a Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, awarded annually by Yale University.