Ben Okri, My Neighbor and Friend

When in autumn of that year, 1987, our new Cypriot landlady told us, whispering, that a Nigerian novelist would be moving into the ground-floor Finsbury Park flat, just below ours, I felt that my luck was in. My flatmates and I, all of us students with a SOAS association, had just moved into the square built, yellow-brick house ourselves. I was about to embark on a PhD in African literature, on the Nigerian novel to be precise. Plus I harbored a secret ambition to write a novel. And here was news that a Nigerian novelist was living downstairs. It felt almost too good to be true, as if the stars were coming into propitious alignment.

It would have been unbelievable to me then—and yet this is probably the most providential part—that nearly thirty years later, Ben would be one of the people I have known longest in the nearly three decades that I have lived in England, which is over half my life. It would also have been unbelievable that on our scribbled paths around London, the rest of the UK, and wider Europe in the intervening years, we have happily, very often without design, kept reencountering one another; and that, moreover, thanks to Ben and his luminous writing, I have several times encountered actual good luck, what I might call, with apologies to David Shields, real-life “luck effects.”

What do I mean by this? What are these luck effects? First of all, Ben’s work has put me in touch with some amazing people, in particular enthused readers of his work, who have rapidly also become friends. For example, one of the fathers in my Oxford book club, an airline pilot, was turned onto reading, he once told me, through his encounter with The Famished Road. He found the story so spellbinding, he said, that forever afterwards he would try to keep on reading in order to rediscover the same magic. Secondly, through talking to Ben I came to a fuller and more dynamic sense of West African writing than I had before, though I was a long-time admirer of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Flora Nwapa, Elechi Amadi, and others. It was a sense of the writing so vivid and intense that I was ultimately inspired to write my own returning child or abiku story, my 2008 novel Nile Baby.

And thirdly, and most concretely, Ben brought me luck because his work once handed me an actual happy windfall of over £100, a huge sum for an early career lecturer at the time. In October 1991, I bet on the then outsider novel The Famished Road to win the Booker Prize. I remember clearly that moment of walking into the bookmaker’s in Leeds, where I now lived, the twinge in my fingers, the tightness in my throat, a sensation of luck-on-the-way. How could this bet not bring me luck, I thought, seeing as I was betting on the work of my neighbor Ben Okri? In fact, all the reflections I am sharing here about knowing Ben trace a story of good fortune and good fellowship—of a longstanding friendship forged on the basis of happy contingency with someone who is, putting it simply, good at being friends, despite the business of his life.

I do not have a sharp memory of my first proper meeting or conversation with our new neighbor Ben Okri, beyond the initial nods and hellos we exchanged in our shared hallway. Before the first week was out one of my flatmates had bought his most recent book, Incidents at the Shrine, from the Dillons close to SOAS, and we all devoured it in the kitchen, thinking with a thrill of the author writing his next book in the room just below. Generally, though, we lay low at first, perhaps myself most of all. Partly this was because we were in awe. We had seen “the Nigerian writer,” as the landlady called him, coming in sometimes, always crossing the street diagonally, and he looked to us very much as we imagined a writer, with...