Ben Okri
Too poor to finish university, he wrote The Famished Road and became the youngest Booker Prize winner
Ben Okri was born in Minna, Nigeria, and spent his early childhood in London before his family returned to Lagos, where he grew up during the Nigerian civil war. He began writing as a teenager, and a Lagos newspaper published some of his early pieces, but his ambitions outran what his family could afford.
He moved back to England on a scholarship to study comparative literature at the University of Essex, only for the grant to fall through partway through the course. Unable to pay his fees or his rent, he left his studies and spent a period sleeping in parks and on friends floors, reading and writing in libraries during the day. He has described those years of near destitution as formative rather than wasted.
His early novels drew on this hardship and on Nigerian political turmoil, but it was The Famished Road, published in 1991, that transformed his standing. Narrated by an abiku, a spirit child who moves between the world of the living and the dead, it won the Booker Prize that year, making Okri, at thirty two, the youngest winner up to that point and the first Black African writer to take the prize.
He has continued to publish novels, poetry and essays, and remains an outspoken commentator on politics, the environment and the state of Nigeria.