Ben Okri is a prolific Booker-Prize winning novelist and essayist, but has published only two collections of poetry. The first was An African Elegy and the second was Mental Fight. Both were highly regarded. Thus a third collection is a literary event, especially since 13 years have elapsed since his last. Okri's new volume, Wild, is very much suited to this fragile era of change that we are living through today. A period when the delicacy of nature around us is commensurate with the forms and images inside us. Both can be easily destroyed, and both are subject to a certain sort of transformation. Yet change is here whether this is what we want or not, and we will have to learn to dance with it as gracefully as possible. There is no other way.

Author Biography

Ben Okri has published 9 novels, including The Famished Road and Starbook, as well as collections of poetry, short stories and essays. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been awarded the OBE as well as numerous international prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore. He is a Vice-President of the English Centre of International PEN and was presented with a Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum. He was born in Nigeria and lives in London.