Booker Prize-winning novelist Ben Okri has revealed that he thinks about a story for up to 10 years before committing pen to paper, admitting that many of his ideas simply "vanish" during that time.
"If they are any good, they will not leave," said Okri at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. "I like holding an idea for a long time because it's my way of understanding how strong it is, how valuable it is, and whether it can sustain all the changes of the years. That does mean that many ideas I have vanish because they didn't stand the test of time."
Okri, who recently published his 11th novel, The Freedom Artist, argued that, "If [an idea] can't last 10 years in your consciousness, why would it last 10 years in the world?"
The 60-year-old said he had been carrying The Freedom Artist, a dystopian novel about a city where books are banned, for 20 years.
“It was only when the conditions of the world become tougher, meaner, more unpleasant in a way, that suddenly it became necessary to find a way to tell this story,” he said. “I’m very keen on the relationship between the times in which we find ourselves and the narratives it becomes possible to tell because of that.
“I’ve been haunted by the idea that we carry around prisons inside us,” he continued. “We carry prisons of class, prisons of race, prisons of gender, prisons of perception, of ourselves and other people.
“One of the most important things we have to do as human beings is the progressive liberation of ourselves from these prisons that we carry inside us.”
Okri, who won the Booker Prize in 1991 for The Famished Road, also said that it took him five years to "get over" winning the award, which changed his approach to writing.
“It comes with certain responsibilities that you can’t escape,” he said. “Before winning the prize, you were writing in your free, bloody-minded way, carving sentences. You have an audience of about a thousand if you’re lucky.
“The morning afterwards, suddenly you have an audience of a hundred thousand, it literally changes overnight. It took about five years to get over that. I had to double the intensity with which I worked just to compensate for that.”
The Abu Dhabi International Book Fair continues until Tuesday. For more information, visit www.adbookfair.com
