Ben Okri

Born on March 15, 1959, in Minna, in what was then Nigeria's Northern Region, to an Urhobo father and a half-Igbo mother, Ben Okri was taken to London before he turned two so his father, Silver, could study law; he spent his earliest years in Peckham before the family returned to Lagos in 1966, where his father took on cases for clients who could not pay. At fourteen, turned away from a physics course in Nigeria for his age, Okri felt a sudden conviction that poetry, not science, was his calling, and later attended Urhobo College in Warri. He returned to England in 1978 on a Nigerian government grant to study comparative literature at the University of Essex; when the funding collapsed he found himself homeless, sleeping in London parks and moving between friends' flats, an ordeal that fed the writing that followed. His first novel, Flowers and Shadows, appeared in 1980 when he was twenty-one, followed by The Landscapes Within (1981) and the story collections Incidents at the Shrine (1986) and Stars of the New Curfew (1988). The Famished Road (1991), narrated by Azaro, an abiku spirit child who breaks his pact with the spirit world to remain among the living, won the Booker Prize and made him, at thirty-two, its youngest winner and the first Black writer to receive it. He completed the trilogy with Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998), and has since published the novels Astonishing the Gods, Dangerous Love, In Arcadia, Starbook, The Age of Magic, and The Freedom Artist, alongside the poetry collections An African Elegy, Mental Flight, Wild, and A Fire in My Head. He has served as vice-president of the Caine Prize for African Writing since 2012 and was knighted in 2023 for services to literature. He lives in London.

In spring 1986, in a rented maisonette on Lorraine Road in north London, his first real home after months of sleeping rough, Okri filled a black A4 notebook by hand through the night with the opening chapters of a novel narrated by a spirit child. He later called it among the happiest writing of his life.