Aminatta Forna

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. We're trying to make sense of the past, so we start to excavate our memories.

A hospital is a good place to set various dilemmas.

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, as a writer, is what I try to create.

Most writers I know go for word counts, and I used to be a journalist, so I guess that's ingrained.

I temporarily became a surgeon for 'Memory of Love'. I spent two weeks in an operating theatre, watching amputations, and I loved it.

Everyone thinks I have a coffee plantation in Sierra Leone, but I have a cashew crop project. I wrote about a woman who owns a coffee plantation! When you are talking about a woman writer coming from a hot country, there's a complete assumption that she is writing about her own life.

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

My family's a ruling family.

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

Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.