Susannah Tarbush reports from the opening event of the recent Caine Prize 10th anniversary tour in the UK, which saw Ben Okri address African literature enthusiasts at the British Library, alongside Brian Chikwava, Chika Unigwe and Binyavanga Wainaina:
Okri described the Caine Prize as being “the result of a love story: Baroness Emma Nicholson’s love for Michael Caine, and Michael Caine’s love for Africa.” The late Sir Michael Caine was the former chairman of Booker plc and for nearly 25 years chairman of the Booker Prize management committee.
After his death, his widow Baroness Nicholson, a Liberal Democrat member of the European Parliament, launched the Caine prize in his memory. The prize represents “the translation of grief into dream, and of the dream into reality,” Okri said.
Okri recalled that when the prize was first launched “we didn’t know how it was going to turn out; it had never been done before. I thought it was an extraordinary adventure: submissions were invited and suddenly from all over the continent these entries started coming in. We read our way through hundreds of stories.”The inaugural prize in 2000 went to the Sudanese-Egyptian writer Leila Aboulela for her story “The Museum.” Okri noted that the prize has so far been won by five women and five men: “there has been no gender bias.”
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