At the Ben Okri reading, in Foyles bookshop, with friends

On Tuesday I met my ex-MFA colleague, the Indian novelist and poet Nabina Das. Nabina is currently in Stirling, on a fellowship, and was visiting London for the week. I managed to guide her out of the mapless vortex that is St. John’s Wood, and into central London for a reading and talk with Ben Okri. All the photographs below are stolen from her.

Ben Okri is a Nigerian Booker prize winning novelist and poet, long resident in London, and his talk and poems were full of slightly bewildering references to pentagrams, energies, leaps, and other semi-Blakean references that I admired but did not completely understand. He was charming, charismatic, deeply read; the reading was run smoothly by Foyle’s events team, and the audience contained a great mix of races, accents, backgrounds. I felt proud of London, being there.

At the reading, we met Nabina’s friend, the wonderful poet and scholar Sabitha Satchi, and headed to the pub (s) to discuss all sorts of entertaining things, literary and otherwise. A great evening.