The poet and novelist Ben Okri has repaid the compliment of being cited as an inspiration in Jeremy Corbyn’s first major speech as Labour leader – in a poem celebrating a new dream of political power bringing peace, health and happiness.
Corbyn, in his first speech as leader to a Labour conference, namechecked Okri, along with Maya Angelou and Kier Hardie, saying: “It was the great Nigerian writer Ben Okri who perhaps put it best: ‘The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love.’”
Okri, a Booker prize-winning novelist, playwright and poet, has responded with a new poem in which he does not name Corbyn, but comes close to conjuring a vision of a bearded angel in a tweed jacket. A New Dream of Politics is a salute to idealism, and a rejection of “cynics and doomsayers”, which he has given exclusively to the Guardian.
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