About The Magic Lamp

Twenty-five stories,

twenty-five paintings,

five years to write,

ten years to paint.

This is an extraordinary collaboration between artist and artist: the Booker Prize-winning writer Ben Okri and the painter Rosemary Clunie. Together they have created a world, and peopled it with dreams.

Twenty-five fairy tales for adults, these narratives are a response to our times, informed by our world but not limited by it, imaginative, enchanting, haunting – both prescient and prophetic. Twenty-five original paintings, beautiful, playful, intimate, dreamlike, these works pull you in to a land of colour and vision.

Who can say which came first, the word or image, when both grew together out of a long friendship and a creative symbiosis.

What if Calvino and Magritte had combined inspiration? What if we could see our world again with a child’s eyes?

What if there really is a magic lamp?