Hay Festival 2012: What they dream about in Africa I write for whoever enjoys the kind of fiction I enjoy. As a child, books about hobbits or flying saucers or alternative universes did not interest me, perhaps because at some level I was always in awe of the vastness of the world, of the many places I was yet to learn about, of the millions of ordinary human stories yet untold, each one worthy, each one capable of Truth and Beauty. And so I was particularly drawn to books that I like to call realist literature, books populated by recognisably real human beings living in real places. Of course one must use the word "real" with some reservation. The world of realist literature is not the same as the real world, but it is close enough, aligned enough, to the real world to be able to illuminate it. In the words of the ancient Latin Poet, Horace: the role of literature is to instruct and delight. Realist fiction is not merely the recording of the real, as it were, it is more than that, it seeks to infuse the real with meaning, which perhaps is why the artist works with a frown. As events unfold, we do not always know what they mean. But in telling the story of what happened, meaning emerges and we are able to make connections with emotive significance. Realist fiction is, above all, the process of turning fact into truth. I knew the basic facts of Nigerian history when I first read Chinua Achebe's novels Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, but it was those novels that made me realise that while I may very well know the facts, I did not really know the truths. Bloodless words like "pacification" and "amalgamation" and "indirect rule" were the facts, but the truths were in the human stories. A respected man being flogged publicly by agents of the colonial government. A priest, once resplendent in his pride and stubbornness, now reduced to sitting on a cold prison floor because he had dared to reject an offer from a British district officer. And in images such as these, I learned a great truth which the history books said nothing about: the loss of dignity. It is easy to assume that our collective humanity is self-evident, that we do not need to search for it. But we live in a time of numbers and facts, in a world where an acceptable response to the news of death is to click the "LIKE" button on Facebook. We live in a world where we so often quote figures of the number of the dead in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Congo until they become just that: figures. Each time I read these news articles, I find myself thinking - what do they dream about in Congo? How do they fall in love in Afghanistan? How do they resolve family quarrels in Iraq? What do they like to eat? Of course we must know about the dead and the dying, and of course these figures and facts are essential, but they must, they should, co-exist with human stories. We should know how people die but we should also know how they live. When we read human stories, we become alive in bodies not our own. Literature is in many ways like faith: it is a leap of imagination. Both reading and writing require an imaginative leap and it is that imaginative leap that enables us to become alive in bodies not our own. It seems to me that we live in a world where it has become increasingly important to try and live in bodies not our own, to embrace empathy, to constantly be reminded that we share, with everybody in every part of the world, a common and equal humanity. But I must hasten to clarify that I am not suggesting that we are all the same. We most certainly are not. Many of us would be reluctant to live in a world in which everyone were the same; we would be suffocated by boredom. Literature is indeed about how we are different. The American writer John Updike, after reading Arrow of God, wrote to Chinua Achebe to say that a western writer would not have allowed the destruction of a character as rich as the protagonist Ezeulu. Perhaps what Updike had implicitly understood was that in Achebe's world, very different from the Western world depicted in the literature with which Updike was familiar, the preservation of the community mattered more than the preservation of the individual. Or in the words of a character in the novel itself - "an animal rubs its itching flank against a tree, but a man asks his kinsman to scratch him." This is part of realist literatures magic: that we are able to thrill to the magnificent diversity in the world. And so we read not to see how other people are like us, but simply to see them, to truly see them. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delivers the Commonwealth Lecture 'To Instruct and Delight: a Case for Realist Literature" in the Big Tent at 1pm. Event 432