Delia Jarrett-Macauley is a writer, academic and broadcaster with a career spanning over 20 years. Her books include a biography of the Jamaican feminist Una Marson and Reconstructing Womanhood, Reconstructing Feminism: Writings on Black Women (Routledge, 1996). The latter was the first British feminist anthology to examine concepts of womanhood and feminism within the context of "race" and ethnicity

Jarrett-Macauley's first novel Moses, Citizen and Me, (Granta Books, 2005) is a haunting tale about Sierra Leone's civil war, which forced guns on an estimated 15,000 children between 1991 and 2001.

In 2006, Moses, Citizen and Me won the George Orwell Prize for political writing. The annual prize is awarded to writers judged to have best achieved George Orwell's aim "to make political writing into an art" and seeks to recognize good accessible writing about politics, political thinking or public policy.

In their comments the judges said, "Anyone who has spent time in Africa can immediately recognize the power and truth of her descriptions. It is a work of great intimacy and moral complexity, the kind of writing that sheds light on a world we barely understand." Andrew O'Hagan, a member of the judging panel, added, "the book is one that Orwell himself might have liked."

Moses, Citizen and Me became the first novel to win the Orwell Prize for political writing since the award started 16 years ago.

Delia Jarrett-Macauley spoke about her writing.

What is your connection with Sierra Leone?

I was born in England to Sierra Leone parents, and had visited the country as a child.

When did you decide you wanted to write about Sierra Leone?

On the day I heard the report on BBC lunchtime news about a child soldier, Citizen, who had been compelled to execute his parents, I knew immediately that I would have to write about him. The Sierra Leone I knew as a child was still inside me, so to speak, and I felt passionately about the country's plight.

Also genocide is a great classical theme in literature from Oedipus onwards, and when the perpetrator is a child, the writer is pushed into considering the toughest emotional and moral questions imaginable. I had worked in Central and Eastern Europe during the 1990s and seen the results of close inter-ethnic conflict, now I had to look at my parents' country where something similar was happening and imagine what a family's response might be to that tragedy.

I dared to proceed, even at the risk of making a complete fool of myself, to tackle the war because it raised such important literary challenges: the peculiarly human talent for re-inventing the self, the question of colonial history in Africa, the variations of African cultural life. I threw myself into writing and then into a period of research because although I was not concerned with documentation of fact, I had to grapple with it in order to understand the moral complexities of what had happened.