Nigerian author Ben Okri reflected on his prize-winning novel, The Famished Road (1991), in the Guardian, saying that he wrote it to find reasons to live. The book, he writes, drew heavily from strange stories his mother told him and his father’s intrinsically African philosophies:
The novel was drawn from a half-glimpsed world, and it was fading fast from reality. In that sense the novel is a sort of elegy. Not the things we saw, but the things in between—the myths in between, the tone in between—were the key to its mysteries.
