Ishmael Beah
The Sierra Leonean author and human rights activist rose to fame with his acclaimed memoir, A Long Way Gone. He was just a teenager when his town became engulfed in Sierra Leone’s civil war in the mid-1990s. In his 2007 A Long Way Gone memoir, Beah touched on the death of his parents and brothers to the conflict, and how he roamed the countryside with a band of boys before being recruited as a child soldier by government forces. After two years, with UNICEF help, he was removed from the army and placed in a rehabilitation home in Freetown. Beah’s most recent novel, Radiance of Tomorrow, was published in January 2014.
