Nigerian author cited by British politician Jeremy Corbyn in his first major speech as Labour leader

10:26 - 14 October 2015

Ben Okri

British politician Jeremy Corbyn has praised Nigerian author Ben Okri in his first major speech as Labour leader.

British politician Jeremy Corbyn has praised Nigerian author Ben Okri in his first major speech as Labour leader.

In his speech at the Labour Conference in Brighton last month, Corbyn said: “It was the great Nigerian writer Ben Okri who perhaps put it best: ‘The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love.’”

Okri, a Booker prize-winning novelist, playwright and poet, In a poem published exclusively in The Guardian, responded with a new poem in which he praised politicians who read widely although he did not name Corbyn.

The two men have never met, and Okri was in the south of France finishing a script when he heard about the speech.

He told the Guardian: “I got a text from a Gibraltar friend who was there – I thought he was hallucinating. But I was very pleased, very touched. It’s a brave thing for a politician these days to admit to reading contemporary writers.

“But we need politicians who read widely, who read the classics, the masters, but who also read contemporary writers, who read across colour, across race, across class. If we don’t have politicians who read widely, how can we ever get to a new politics?”

Okri's poem follows the publication of ‘Poets for Corbyn’, a collection of poetry inspired by Corbyn including poems from Michael Rosen and Pascale Petit, which achieved 5,000 downloads in its first week when it was released earlier this year.