Okri and Nigeria

Okri was born in Nigeria and spent much of his childhood as well as his adult life living in England. Despite his predominantly western residency, Okri's writing has been deeply informed by the years he spent in Nigeria during the country's three-year civil war and the subsequent, highly turbulent postwar years. Writing for the South African Literary Review in September 1992, Carolyn Newton writes that Okri's novel The Famished Road "could not have been born of England's green and pleasant land; his is a heady cocktail of African legend and western classicism." The same can be said of his short stories, which served as the testing ground for the writing style that he popularized with The Famished Road.

From 1967 to 1970, Nigeria was embroiled in a bloody civil war, also known as the Nigerian-Biafran War or the Biafran War, during which an estimated 1 million people were killed...