Bonhams has spotlighted Booker Prize-winning novelist Ben Okri and his latest creative partnership with artist Rosemary Clunie. In a new story published on its editorial platform, the auction house explores how the two collaborators examine the ways artists make sense of the world around them, through the combination of Okri's writing and Clunie's painting. Okri, whose novel The Famished Road won the Booker Prize in 1991, has built a career across novels, poetry, essays and plays. His new joint venture with Clunie takes the form of a book, The True Artist Breaks Out of Jail, issued by Thames & Hudson. The publication weaves together Okri's fiction, essays and poetry with 32 paintings made in collaboration with Clunie, who works across painting, printmaking, video and illustration. The book addresses questions at the heart of contemporary life, from war and climate change to authenticity, truth and the wounds and wonders of the human psyche. Its experimental pairing of image and word is designed to draw readers and viewers into a richer, more personal experience of creativity, and to ask whether the condition of the artist applies in some way to everyone. The project is accompanied by public events, including a conversation between Okri and Clunie at the Royal Academy of Arts in London on 17 October. For Bonhams, the feature reflects the auction house's growing editorial interest in the artists and makers behind the works that pass through its salerooms, placing literary and visual practices on the same footing. Okri was knighted in 2023 for services to literature, and Clunie has exhibited widely since 1991, including presentations at the 2024 Venice Biennale and the World Economic Forum in Davos. Their collaboration builds on a long-standing friendship that has produced several joint projects, including the illustrated collection The Magic Lamp. For the art market, the pairing points to a widening audience: literary readers drawn into painting, and art collectors discovering a writer's visual imagination.