Biography
Ishmael Beah was born in Sierra Leone in 1980. When he was eleven, Ishmael’s life, along with the lives of millions of other Sierra Leoneans, was derailed by the outbreak of a brutal civil war. After his parents and two brothers were killed, Ishmael was recruited to fight as a child soldier. He was thirteen. He fought for almost three years before he was removed from the army by UNICEF and placed in a rehabilitation home. In 1998, Ishmael came to live with an American family in New York City. He completed high school and was subsequently accepted to Oberlin College. In May 2004, Ishmael completed his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and won Oberlin’s Dainne Vruels Fiction Prize for his story.
In A LONG WAY GONE, Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a riveting story. At the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. Eventually released by the army and sent to a UNICEF rehabilitation center, he struggled to regain his humanity and to reenter the world of civilians, who viewed him with fear and suspicion. This is, at last, a story of redemption and hope.
