The Magic Lamp: Dreams of Our Age
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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
Ben Okri (b. 1959) has published ten novels, including The Famished Road and Starbook, as well as collections of poetry, short stories, and essays. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, he has received numerous international awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa, the Aga Khan Prize, and the Chianti Ruffino Antico Fattore International Literary Prize. He is a vice president of PEN International’s English Centre and was presented with a Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum. Born in Nigeria, Okri now lives in London.
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