The Magic Lamp: Dreams of Our Age

Description

Twenty-five stories, twenty-five paintings, five years to write, ten years to paint. This is an extraordinary collaboration between artist and artist: the Booker Prize-winning writer Ben Okri and the painter Rosemary Clunie. Together they have created a world, and peopled it with dreams. Twenty-five fairy tales for adults, these narratives are a response to our times, informed by our world but not limited by it, imaginative, enchanting, haunting - both prescient and prophetic. Twenty-five original paintings, beautiful, playful, intimate, dreamlike, these works pull you in to a land of colour and vision. Who can say which came first, the word or image, when both grew together out of a long friendship and a creative symbiosis. What if Calvino and Magritte had combined inspiration? What if we could see our world again with a child's eyes? What if there really is a magic lamp?

Ben Okri was born in Minna, Nigeria. His childhood was divided between Nigeria, where he saw first hand the consequences of war, and London. He has won many prizes over the years for his fiction, and is also an acclaimed essayist, playwright, and poet.

This is a magical book in every sense, a spellbinding, poetic, artistic journey into our collective imaginations and inner selves -- Will Gompertz [Okri] and Clunie step back from judgment, calling on us to draw our own conclusions. But like Okri's young traveller, we may end up where we started, but seeing the place we thought we knew in a very different light * Financial Times * Those who like their fairy stories with a moral backbone may find succour here * TLS * Okri's writing has a light-as-air elegance, yet its seriousness keeps the stories gravity-bound * New Statesman *