Aminatta forna

I get a very vague idea and - perhaps because I once was a journalist, or perhaps because that's what made me want to be a journalist - I go off and explore it for a bit, rather than mapping out a...

No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, 'Aminatta, this is what's happened so far.' You have to work it out for yourself, and by the time you do, it's ancient history to many of the players....

What ultimately happened is that my country had a war. I think it would be extraordinary, as a writer, not to want to write about that.

I'm at my desk for about 9:30 A.M., and I stay there all day. Then there's a lot of checking Facebook and eBay and that sort of thing.

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.

My childhood ended in this horrible way. I lived in a country where I didn't trust anybody.

I'm a doctor's daughter. I'm not squeamish at all.

My family's a ruling family.

I was brought up in a household where you stood up to be counted.

Increasingly, there are those of us who write from outside the center, and those are the writers that I'm most interested in because they bring me into worlds that I did not previously know. And that,...