Ben Okri

Okri was made an honorary vice-president of the English Centre for the International PEN and a member of the board of the Royal National Theatre. On 26 April 2012 Okri was appointed the new vice-president of the Caine Prize for African Writing, having been on the advisory committee and associated with the prize since it was established 13 years prior.

Okri has described his work as influenced as much by the philosophical texts in his father's book shelves, as it was by literature, and Okri cites the influence of both Francis Bacon and Michel de Montaigne on his A Time for New Dreams. His literary influences include Aesop's Fables, Arabian Nights, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". Okri's 1999 epic poem, Mental Fight, also is named after a quotation from the poet William Blake's "And did those feet ...", and critics have noted the close relationship between Blake and Okri's poetry.

His reputation as an author was secured when his novel The Famished Road won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1991, making him the youngest ever winner of the prize.

For three years from 1988, he lived in a Notting Hill flat (rented from publisher friend Margaret Busby): "I brought the first draft of The Famished Road with me and that flat was where I began rewriting it.... Something about my writing changed round about that time. I acquired a kind of tranquillity. I had been striving for something in my tone of voice as a writer — it was there that it finally came together.... That flat is also where I wrote the short stories that became Stars of the New Curfew."

Okri's success as a writer began when he published his first novel Flowers and Shadows in 1980, at the age of 21. He then served West Africa magazine as poetry editor from 1983 to 1986, and was a regular contributor to the BBC World Service between 1983 and 1985, continuing to publish throughout this period.

Since he published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows (1980), Okri has risen to an international acclaim, and he often is described as one of Africa's leading writers. His best known work, The Famished Road, which was awarded the 1991 Booker Prize, along with Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches make up a trilogy that follows the life of Azaro, a spirit-child narrator, through the social and political turmoil of an African nation reminiscent of Okri's remembrance of war-torn Nigeria.

At the age of 14, after being rejected for admission to a short university program in physics because of his youth and lack of qualifications, Okri experienced a revelation that poetry was his chosen calling. He began writing articles on social and political issues, but these never found a publisher. He then wrote short stories based on those articles, and some were published in women's journals and evening papers. Okri claimed that his criticism of the government in some of this early work led to his name being placed on a death list, and necessitated his departure from the country. In 1978, Okri moved back to England and went to study comparative literature at Essex University with a grant from the Nigerian government. When funding for his scholarship fell through, however, Okri found himself homeless, sometimes living in parks and sometimes with friends. He describes this period as "very, very important" to his work: "I wrote and wrote in that period... If anything [the desire to write] actually intensified."

Ben Okri OBE FRSL (born 15 March 1959) is a Nigerian poet and novelist. Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions, and has been compared favourably to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez.

Ben Okri is a member of the Urhobo people; his father was Urhobo, and his mother was half-Igbo. He was born in Minna in west central Nigeria to Grace and Silver Okri in 1959. His father, Silver, moved his family to London when Okri was less than two years old so that Silver could study law. Okri thus spent his earliest years in London and attended primary school in Peckham. In 1968 Silver moved his family back to Nigeria where he practised law in Lagos, providing free or discounted services for those who could not afford it. His exposure to the Nigerian civil war and a culture in which his peers at the time claimed to have seen visions of spirits, later provided inspiration for Okri's fiction.