Ben Okri in conversation with Zainab Umar

At this year’s Book Aid International platform, Booker Prize-winning poet and novelist Ben Okri and Book Aid International Trustee and youth leader from the Mo Ibrahim Foundation Zainab Umar explore how readers and writers can help to influence the future and how creating a generation of readers is central to regenerating communities in Nigeria and around the world. They consider how storytellers shape narratives on a personal and national level, examining the role of reading in helping people to reimagine their future, and how books play a part in modulating the past and opening up new destinies.