Aminatta Forna in Conversation with John Freeman I 2021-2022 Readings and Talks Series

On November 9th, 2021, the Lannan Center presented a reading and talk featuring author Aminatta Forna and editor John Freeman. Introduction by David Gewanter.About Aminatta FornaAminatta Forna was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Great Britain and spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand and Zambia. She is the award-winning author of the novels Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones, and a memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water, and most recently the essay collection, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion. Forna is the recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University, has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award 2011, a Hurston Wright Legacy Award the Liberaturpreis in Germany and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, and was made OBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours 2017. She is currently Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. About John FreemanJohn Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary annual of new writing, and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as Tales of Two Americas, an anthology about income inequality in America, and Tales of Two Planets, an anthology of new writing about inequality and the climate crisis globally. He is also the author of two poetry collections, Maps and The Park. His work is translated into more than twenty languages, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he teaches writing at New York University.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.