by Ben Okri

Ben Okri is a Nigerian-born author known for juxtaposing incisive social critique and African mythological tradition. His Booker Prize-winning third novel, The Famished Road, exemplifies this duality through its narrator, Azaro, a boy with one foot in the world of modern Nigeria and one foot in the spirit world. Though Okri’s novel features Yoruba characters, he is not Yoruba himself but belongs to the Urhobo, another of the more than 200 ethnic groups that make up the Nigerian populace. Born in Minna, Nigeria, in 1959, Okri moved with his family the following year to England. His father studied law there, then returned to Nigeria and served as a lawyer for the inhabitants of Ajegunle, a slum district in Lagos. Ben Okri gained an intimate knowledge there of the complaints of the poor and how they fared in Nigeria’s justice system, which...