PREPARING for an interview with a writer, one crams down his work like goose volunteering for foie gras. In the case of Ben Okri, this meant I hurled myself at the 1991 Booker winner, The Famished Road for a few chapters, before gulping down his shorter and even more allegorical 1995 novel Astonishing The Gods. Already gorged, I then topped up on the multiple aphorisms of his new collection of essays, A Way of Being Free.

Okri will be reading one of these essays when he opens the Cuirt Festival of International Literature in Galway on Tuesday. Despite an open manner and a sonorous voice, he claims to be ill at ease with readings. "They are strangely at odds with the way the work is done, which is in solitude and cyclically."

No less than three essays in the collection celebrate The Joys of Storytelling, harking back to the oral tradition - wouldn't he welcome the chance to recreate a similar contact? "The storyteller was at the same height as the people. In a reading, you're fixed there on a platform whereas in the storytelling tradition you are semi circled by them. This creates problems for critics coming to my work, but not for my readers..."

As for the interviewer, half digested aphorisms came tumbling out of my notes in the early stages of our meeting and sat there uncomfortably between us. Here are a few: "Poets are helplessly on the side of the greatest good, the highest causes, the most just future"; "All true artists suspect that if the world really knew what they were doing they would be punished". "There is a touch of blessedness in the art of writing"; and "We have not yet discovered what it means to be human."

Even in the decade of the fatwa (Okri dedicates the title essay to Salman Rushdie), I initially found the grand, romantic scale of these claims embarrassing, prompting questions like "Done any suffering today, then?" or "How blessed have you been feeling recently?" Instead, I ventured that his version of the writer's role might seem a little old fashioned to some.

His reply started in the same "heightened vein but then grounded itself. "There is no such thing as old fashioned when it comes to heroic artists. Today we too often think of writers as people who simply write books. ,We forget the fantastic optimism it takes to write, despite all the difficulties."

"People who work down mines develop breathing problems. Writers have their own. Look how cracked up James Baldwin's face is, how crumpled Samuel Beckett's. A banker's face doesn't look like that."

Okri lists the occupational hazards of authors - "insomnia, marital problems, financial difficulties, depression, incurable eccentricities, bewildering egos".

Writers should be given allowances.

"The nine to five life that 99 per cent of people lead is one aspect of the things and values of society that we need. But there's another set of people who don't think like that, who need the space, the freedom to look at the narrowness of our lives, if our history is going the right way. A simple psychic, social and cultural division of labour."

Isn't this all, well, immodest?

The suggestion truly surprised Ben Okri - several times in this discussion he returned to refute it. "I'm not saying anything new. That freedom for the writer has been eroded over the years. We've got softer, bourgeoisified, more into sales pitches when we need a certain wildness, a lovely rage. An ability to get on with the world and an ability to be invisible."

I asked how much of this he had obtained for himself. "Not nearly as much as I'd like. It can't be won back by one individual."

Okri, who is 38, lives alone in Maida Vale but his enjoyment of London as "a great place to write because it leaves you alone" also amplifies this wish to be invisible. I said I was finding it difficult to unearth a picture of his own life in the course of the interview - other subjects seemed to have fewer secrets. "No. Those other people are doing a better job of their secrets than I am. Maybe it's because I live details but share essentials."

Okri has been frustrated by two perceptions of him: an airy fairy" magical realist and an "African" writer. "I'm an extremely concrete person. It's the ordinary that's magical. People who know me know I've got one of the hardest eyes in the business. All the odd conjunctions of my life make it very difficult for me to have any illusions. I've got to be awake all the time - I'm even awake in my dreams."

A Nigerian birth, an upbringing in Lagos and in south London, a classical European education combined with first hand experience of the Nigerian civil war all mean Okri qualifies as an African writer: but he hates the soubriquet. "There are certain givens that come with it and lead to a generally negative perception. One or two reviews of The Famished Road said you have to know Africa to read it. Wake up!" - he makes as if to slap the imaginary critic into consciousness.

What brings these two frustrations together is his firm assertion that his writing about Africa ("a land bristling with too many stories" - The Joys Of Storytelling III) is rigorously organised. "If you wrote about it realistically, people would say it's monstrous, gothic ... I've coped with that by embracing it and underpinning it with structures, like the columns that hold up the Parthenon." He has little time for "the one or two who miss the discipline, just because I don't write essays about my own work...".

But we do finally reach the intimate and the magical at once when I ask him about the aphorism "We have not yet discovered what it means to be human". Last June, his mother died. "I realised I had been living in a state of enchantment and I didn't know it. I was angry with myself."

MOVING back to writing, Okri stressed two unfashionable values". The first was humility - "getting away from the great, big, walloping, spoilt child of the ego".

The second? Okri paused and demurred, clearly embarrassed. "You'll jump on me if I use this word. But it's hard to find a replacement." The word, he confessed, was "love". I pointed out that the word "love" was strewn through his writing. "Yes, but I'm not there then you read it, thank goodness."