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Ben Okri has published 8 novels, including The Famished Road, as well as collections of poetry, short stories and essays. His work has been translated into more than twenty 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.
Nigerian writer Okri's stories are all set in his native country, either in the astounding human welter of modern Lagos or the more animistic yet no less brutalized hinterlands. Official corruption, military brutality, alcoholism, power failures, nightmarish urban over. crowding - Okri's tales trade in these routinely, in a terse, clenched, often telescopic style. Particularly degraded here (as in In the City of Red Dust and When The Lights Return ) are the normal relations between men and women: in Okri's world no longer is there ease or even desire, only mouths full of ashes. Tapster poignantly encapsulates the economic changes (and cruel governments they engender) that drive an underdeveloped country schizoid. But by far the best thing here, filled with real flavors rather than abstract glints, is the title story, about a salesman of a worthless cure-all medicine, living on the tightrope of people's wishes to believe they have some control of their fate and their cynical disbelief as well. Lagos pulses off the pages (especially in a scene set on an unfortunate bus), and it's here that Okri's clipped stylistics work to best effect. Different work, slightly mannered but often compelling. (Kirkus Reviews)
