Happiness - A Novel
Aminatta Forna
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Summary
Happiness is a gorgeous, subtle love story and work of moral significance. It returns immigration to the level of the personal, rather than the political. Aminatta Forna is currently the Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University. She will be living in the USA during publication of Happiness. Aminatta Forna is a judge for the 2017 Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Folio Academy. She has acted as judge for a number of literary awards, including the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Caine Prize and the International Man Booker. Forna’s last book, The Hired Man, was selected for several best of the year lists: NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, The Independent (UK), The Evening Standard (UK), The Australian (Australia), and the New Zealand Listener (NZ), and garnered phenomenal reviews. It was also selected for Georgetown University’s 2016 Marino Family International Writers’ Academic Workshop program, which assigns one book by a major international author to the university’s incoming first-year students. Forna’s The Memory of Love won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book; was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the International Dublin IMPAC Award, and the Warwick Prize for Writing; and was selected as an Indie Next List Notable selection and an Essence Book Club Pick. In 2014 Aminatta Forna was named as a winner of a Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize awarded annually by Yale University. She has been named a finalist for the 2016 Neustadt Award. Both prizes are awarded for an author's body of work. Forna's books have been translated into sixteen languages. Her essays have appeared in Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and Vogue. She has written stories for BBC radio and her TV credits include The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu (BBC Television, 2009).