Ben Okri

Ben Okri (born in Minna, 1959) is a Nigerian-born poet and novelist who writes in English. His work belongs to the postmodern and postcolonial tradition, and critics often compare him with writers such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. In 1991 his novel The Famished Road won the Booker Prize.

His father was Urhobo and his mother was half-Igbo. His father, a lawyer, moved the family to London when Okri was a baby, so his earliest years were spent there. In 1966 they returned to Nigeria and settled in Lagos. He grew up during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), an experience that shaped much of his imagination. By his own account, he decided at fourteen that poetry was his vocation, and his early articles on politics never found a publisher. He has said that his criticism of the government put him at risk and led him to leave the country.

In 1978 he returned to England to study comparative literature at the University of Essex. His first novel, Flowers and Shadows, appeared in 1980 and portrays a young man's disillusion with corruption in Nigeria. His novels, stories and poems blend everyday life with the spiritual, drawing on legends, spirits and oral tradition. Although critics have linked his work to magical realism, he rejects that label and prefers to speak of a kind of dream logic.

His legacy lies in widening the reach of African literature in English and in showing that reality has more dimensions than realist fiction usually allows. The trilogy about the spirit-child Azaro, which begins with The Famished Road, remains his most widely read work.