Why is Britain sliding into “imaginative impotence”? Novelist Ben Okri says its because the country’s writers have little status at home. “Our novelists and poets are unappreciated in their own land, beaten down with defeatism and saddled with an inferiority complex in comparison to their lionised American counterparts, the Nigerian-born author of The Famished Road claimed. ‘It is all very well celebrating the dead, but we are deaf to what living writers are saying, particularly about the war situation we now find ourselves in’.”