Alison Flood of the U.K.'s Guardian is reporting that Aminatta Forna has won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for her story of postwar Sierra Leone, The Memory of Love.
Forna, who was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and raised in Sierra Leone, said she hoped that the win, announced in Sydney at the weekend, would make her country proud. "I won the Africa regional prize first, and the excitement in Sierra Leone about having a Sierra Leonean win the regional prize was just exceptional," she said, pronouncing herself "really delighted" to take the overall award, which is worth £10,000 ($16,463).
"We have had 20 very difficult years in Sierra Leone, so first of all, in terms of making my country proud, I think the win is important; but second, the whole book is really about trying to bring some peace to the country, laying to rest some of the things that have happened in the past, so for those reasons I am really delighted."
Telling the story of a British psychologist who arrives in Freetown, Sierra Leone, just after the end of the country's bloody civil war, The Memory of Love weaves together his life with that of a young surgeon and a dying man. The book was praised by judges for its "risk taking, elegance and breadth."
Read more at the Guardian.
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