Aminatta Forna, OBE (born 1964) is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

On 7 March 2014, Forna was announced as the recipient of the 2014 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (Fiction).

In 2015 Forna was part of the judging panel which awarded the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award to Yiyun Li.

The finalists for the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature were announced in May 2015. The list included Forna and writers, poets and playwrights from around the world. The majority of the finalists were women writers.

Forna was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to literature. Forna is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, sits on the advisory committee for the Royal Literary Fund and the Caine Prize for African Writing, has been a judge on several high-profile prize panels, including the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and continues to champion the work of up-and-coming diverse authors. In 2019, the Scotiabank Giller Prize announced that Forna was one of the judges for the 2019 prize, an award of Cdn $140,000 for a Canadian writer.

In March 2019, Forna's Happiness was shortlisted for the European Literature Prize, and in April 2019 was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) Ondaatje Prize and for the Jhalak Prize

Commenting on her work in a wide-ranging interview with Keija Parssinen in World Literature Today, Forna said: "I think what novelists do is bring into relief something that’s been hiding in plain sight ... describing what it might look like from elsewhere, the view from elsewhere."