Rising Heart

'Rising Heart will never leave you; searing, powerful, disturbing, hopeful.' The Honourable Dame Quentin Bryce AD CVO The astonishing tale of a woman who found joy after enduring unimaginable horror. In 1999, Sierra Leonean teenager Aminata Conteh-Biger was kidnapped from her father's arms during the country’s brutal eleven-year civil war. Terror and violence were weapons deployed in the bloody conflict; and in this environment, Aminata was held captive for months. On release, the UNHCR recognised that Aminata's captors still posed a serious threat to her safety. Still in her teens, she was put on a plane, flown to Australia - a land she had barely heard of – to start a life as a refugee. Refusing to let her trauma define her, Aminata went on to build a beautiful life for herself. A near-death experience during the birth of her first child turned her attention to the mothers and babies of her home country, where women are 200 times more likely to die having a baby than in Australia. And so, Aminata went back to help, founding the Aminata Maternal Foundation in 2014. Rising Heart, with revered Australian author Juliet Rieden, is Aminata’s personal account of her remarkable life, revealed in full for the first time.