Meet our personality for this week, Ishmael Beah

Born on 23 November, Ishmael Beah is a Sierra Leonean writer and human rights activist, famous for being the author of the acclaimed memoir “A Long Way Gone”, about his experience as a child soldier during the Civil War. His novel Radiance of Tomorrow was published in January 2014. His most recent novel Little Family was published in April 2020.

A Long Way Gone was nominated for a Quill Award in the Best Debut Author category for 2007. Time magazine’s Lev Grossman named it one of the Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2007, ranking it at No. 3, and praising it as “painfully sharp”, and its ability to take “readers behind the dead eyes of the child-soldier in a way no other writer has.” The book was also included in Amazon’s 100 Books to read in a Lifetime list.

With his novel, Radiance of Tomorrow, Beah explores the life of a community including Benjamin and Bockarie, two friends who return to Bockarie’s hometown, Imperi, after the civil war. The village is in ruins, the ground covered in bones. Radiance of Tomorrow is said to be ‘written with the moral urgency of a parable and the searing precision of a firsthand account’. It earned positive reviews in the New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and the Boston Globe.

On January 24, 2020, Beah spoke, together with Romeo Dallaire and Omar Khadr, at a conference at Dalhousie University, on human rights and child soldiers.

In April 2020, Beah published his third book, Little Family. A “deeply affecting novel”, Little Family tells the story of five young people living at the margins of society and struggling to replace the homes they have lost with the one they have created together.

Beah is also a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, aiming to amplify the voices of children affected by war.