Former Commonwealth middleweight champion Michael Watson had started boxing at age 14. A near-fatal brain injury in a fight against Chris Eubank in 1991 left him in a coma for 40 days. Though he recovered later, he never went back to the ring and won damages worth almost £1 million for the mishap.
Distinguished Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri OBE FRSL is counted among the leading African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions. His 1991 novel The Famished Road led him to become the youngest-ever winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Other notable works of Okri includes A Way of Being Free, A Time for New Dreams and Starbook.