Ben Okri is one of the best known of the first generation of Nigerian novelists who have described in their fiction the psychic costs of the Nigerian transition from colonial rule to independence. He has won many international prizes, including Booker Prizes for The Famished Road (1991) and Infinite Riches (1998). Like his predecessors and compatriots Ken Saro-Wiwa and Wole Soyinka, Okri has used his fiction to focus attention on political injustice, institutional corruption, and economic dispossession without forsaking aesthetic aims. Over the course of his career, Okri's fiction has become increasingly experimental as he has adopted postmodern narrative strategies that reflect his growing dissatisfaction with realism as a mode of expression.

Ben Okri was born to Grace and Silver Oghekeneshineke Loloje Okri on 15 March 1959 in Minna, Nigeria, not long before British colonial rule ended officially on 1 October 1960. He was born at a time of heightened expectation and cultural nationalism...