Literary Influences

According to his latin teacher and housemaster at Harrow School, Maurice Balme and a number of his lecturers at both London and Cambridge universities, Femi Fani-Kayode was an almost obsessive reader from a very early age and he sourced his topics of choice and materials of interest from a variety of areas of study.

A contribution that he made in a television interview that he granted in 2006 confirms the fact that the books and works of the following philosophers, writers, historians, playwrites, essayists, martyrs,historical figures, men and women of God and poets are amongst his favourites. According to him they each had a profound effect in shaping his thinking and views about life, philosophy, faith, government, humanity, politics and what he described in that interview as “the sheer power and creativity of the human will and spirit, the good and evil that are simultaneously inherent and equally co-existent in the hearts and souls of men and the contradictions and complexities of the human psyche” (Galaxy Television “Profiles in Leadership” Interview, 2006).

Amongst these great minds and personalities for whom he evidently has such admiration and respect are C. S Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Marlowe, Charles Dickens, Linton Kwesi Johnson, William Shakespeare, William Golding, Benny Hinn, TD Jakes, Reinhard Bonnke, Simon Schama, Homer, Josephus, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Robert Bolt, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, Adebayo Williams, Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, Wole Soyinka, Simon Kolawole, Sam Nda Isaiah, Lola Fani-Kayode, Dele Momodu, Nicolo Machiavelli, Robert Greene, John Hagee, Paul the Apostle, Voltaire, Tennessee Williams, Geoffrey Chaucer, Alfred Tennyson, Kathryn Kuhlman, Smith Wigglesworth, Oral Roberts, Martin Luther King Jr, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Al Sharpton, Thomas Jefferson, Benson Idahosa, Malcom X, King David, John Brown, Alexander the Great, and William Wilberforce.