Ben Okri
Influences

Okri has described his work as influenced as much by the philosophical texts on his father's bookshelves as by literature, and cites the influence of Francis Bacon and Michel de Montaigne on his A Time for New Dreams. His literary influences include Aesop's Fables, Arabian Nights, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge 's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Okri's 1999 epic poem, Mental Fight, is named after a quotation from the poet William Blake 's " And did those feet... ", and critics have noted a close relationship between Blake and Okri's poetry.

Okri also was influenced by the oral tradition of his people and, particularly, by his mother's storytelling: "If my mother wanted to make a point, she wouldn't correct me, she'd tell me a story." His firsthand experiences of civil war in Nigeria are said to have inspired many of his works.

On the final day of the 2021 COP26 climate meeting in Glasgow, Okri wrote about the existential threat posed by the climate crisis and how ill ‑ equipped humans seem to confront the prospect of their self-inflicted extinction. Indeed, Okri says: "We have to find a new art and a new psychology to penetrate the apathy and the denial that are preventing us making the changes that are inevitable if our world is to survive."
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