Hi, my name is Namina--that's Nam-ee-nuh---and I'm a young adult fantasy author. I didn't always want to be an author. I thought I'd be either a marine biologist or a lawyer. But literally everyone who met me as a kid knew that I would one day write books.
I grew up in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, right as the decade-long civil war was starting. To escape, I read everything I could get my hands on: the Bible cover-to-cover when I was about four, and then lighter fare like The Grapes of Wrath and The Catcher in the Rye. (I'm delighted to tell you I don't remember anything about any of these books now.)
When I was nine, I moved to America. My dad got a call saying the rebels were coming to the capital so he shipped me and my sister to Georgia to live with my mom. It was a very difficult time. I wasn't sure what was happening with my loved ones back home--whether they were alive or not--and I was struggling to fit into my new middle school, where all the kids bullied me because I was a "poor" African from a war-torn country.
(They thought I'd lived in a hut and had elephants in my backyard. I didn't. It was monkeys, and they always scurried over from the marsh next door to raid our pantry.)
These days, I live in London, where I spend my time with my very spoiled maltipoo, Thugnificent, Niffy for short (I wanted to name her Thug, but my family said no) either writing, reading, or watching copious amounts of Kdrama and anime.
I'm currently working on new projects, all of them fantasy, but otherwise, you can catch me enjoying new restaurants or nurturing one-sided grudges against old ones that served me a bad meal one time in 2012.
Copyright © 2020 Namina Forna - All Rights Reserved.