The Window Seat

Aminatta Forna is one of our most important voices and an international literary powerhouse. The Window Seat is the first collection of her acclaimed and influential essays. She has written for such publications as the Guardian , Freeman’s , Granta , The Nation , and The New York Review of Books , among others. She is currently Director and Chair of Poetics at Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. She has incredible connections in the literary and academic worlds, and we’ve already received glowing blurbs from Salman Rushdie, Aleksandar Hemon, Maaza Mengiste, and Chinelo Okparanta noting what a gifted essayist Forna is. We expect more high-profile blurbs. Forna’s essays are elegantly argued, finely written gems that remind us why she was a runner up for the Samuel Johnson Prize for The Devil that Danced on Water , and make an argument for a new cosmopolitanism that is a balm for our interconnected but extremely polarized world. Forna won the Windham Campbell Literature Prize for literary achievement, and her novel The Memory of Love won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. The novel was also shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the International Dublin IMPAC Award, and the Warwick Prize for Writing. She has been a judge for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Caine Prize, the Giller Prize, and the International Man Booker. In 2017, she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Forna’s last book, the novel Happiness , was a Sunday Times (UK) Best Book of the Year, a New York Times Editors’ Choice , and a Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite Book of the Year. Forna’s novel The Hired Man , was selected for several best of the year lists: NPR , San Francisco Chronicle , and Boston Globe , while The Memory of Love was an Indie Next List Notable selection and an Essence Book Club Pick. We expect similar extensive review coverage.