Ben Okri

Okri was knighted at the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to literature.

Ben Okri studied at University of Essex. The recorded working language is English, Nigerian Pidgin and German. The field of work recorded is performing arts. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are Postmodernism. Francis Bacon, William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are recorded as an influence. Works named in the authority record are The Famished Road, Starbook, Songs of Enchantment and Every Leaf a Hallelujah. Distinctions recorded are Officer of the Order of the British Empire, Booker Prize, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Knight Bachelor.

• Honorific Prefix — Sir • Name — Ben Okri • Honorific Suffix — FRSL • Birth Name — Ben Golden Emuobowho Okri • Born — 15 March 1959 • Birthplace — Minna, Nigeria • Occupation — Writer • Education — University of Essex • Movement — Postmodernism, Postcolonialism • Genre — Fiction, essays, poetry • Notable Works — The Famished Road (1991), A Way of Being Free (1997), Starbook (2007), A Time for New Dreams (2011) • Awards — Booker Prize 1991 • Website — https: benokri.co.uk/

Ben Okri is a member of the Urhobo people; his father was Urhobo, and his mother was half-Igbo ("from a royal family"). He was born in Minna in west central Nigeria to Grace and Silver Okri in 1959. His father, Silver, moved his family to London, England, when Okri was less than two years old so that he could study law. Okri thus spent his earliest years in London and attended primary school in Peckham. In 1966, Silver moved his family back to Nigeria, where he practised law in Lagos, providing free or discounted services for those who could not afford it. After attending schools in Ibadan and Ikenne, Okri began his secondary education at Urhobo College at Warri, in 1968, when he was the youngest in his class. His exposure to the Nigerian Civil War and a culture in which his peers at the time claimed to have had visions of spirits provided inspiration for Okri's fiction. At the age of 14, after being rejected for admission to a short university programme in physics because of his youth and lack of qualifications, Okri experienced a revelation that poetry was his chosen calling. He began writing articles on social and political issues, but these never found a publisher. He then wrote short stories based on those articles, and some were published in women's journals and evening papers. Okri has said that his criticism of the government in some of this early work led to his name being placed on a death list, and necessitated his departure from the country.

In 1978, he moved back to England and studied comparative literature at Essex University with a grant from the Nigerian government. But when funding for his scholarship fell through, Okri found himself homeless, sometimes living in parks and sometimes with friends. He has called this period "very, very important" to his work: "I wrote and wrote in that period... If anything [the desire to write] actually intensified." Okri's success as a writer began when he published his debut novel, Flowers and Shadows, in 1980, at the age of 21. From 1983 to 1986, he served as poetry editor of West Africa magazine, and he regularly contributed to the BBC World Service between 1983 and 1985, continuing to publish throughout this period. His reputation as an author was secured when his novel The Famished Road won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1991, making him the prize's youngest ever winner at 32. The novel was written during the time from 1988 that Okri lived in a Notting Hill flat that he rented from publisher friend Margaret Busby, and he has said: • "Something about my writing changed round about that time. I acquired a kind of tranquillity. I had been striving for something in my tone of voice as a writer—it was there that it finally came together.... That flat is also where I wrote the short stories that became [1988's] Stars of the New Curfew." In 1997, Okri was elected vice-president of the English Centre for International PEN and in 1999 was appointed a member of the board of the Royal National Theatre. On 26 April 2012, he was appointed vice-president of the Caine Prize for African Writing, having been on the advisory committee and associated with the prize since it was established 13 years earlier. Okri was appointed as a vice-president of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2022. In June 2023, Okri was awarded a knighthood in the King's Birthday Honours for his extensive services to literature.. In May 2025, he published the curated historical anthology African Stories with Everyman's Library and was subsequently honored with the "Icon of The Africa Centre" award in London for his decades of cultural patronage. He was also appointed as a Co-Chair for the final judging panel of the Queen's Commonwealth Essay Competition

• Illustration — Quote from Okri's Mental Fight on the Memorial Gates, London Since the 1980 publication of Flowers and Shadows, Okri has risen to international acclaim, and he often is described as one of Africa's leading writers. His best known work, The Famished Road, which won the 1991 Booker Prize, along with Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998) make up a trilogy that follows Azaro, a spirit-child narrator, through the social and political turmoil of an African nation reminiscent of Okri's remembrance of war-torn Nigeria. Okri's work is particularly difficult to categorise. It has been widely called postmodern, but some scholars have noted that the seeming realism with which he depicts the spirit-world challenges this categorisation. If Okri does attribute reality to a spiritual world, it is claimed, then his "allegiances are not postmodern [because] he still believes that there is something ahistorical or transcendental conferring legitimacy on some, and not other, truth-claims." Alternative characterisations of Okri's work suggest an allegiance to Yoruba folklore, New Ageism, spiritual realism, magical realism, visionary materialism, and existentialism. Against these analyses, Okri has always rejected the categorisation of his work as magical realism, claiming that this categorisation is the result of laziness by critics and likening it to the observation that "a horse... has four legs and a tail. That doesn't describe it." He has instead described his fiction as obeying a kind of "dream logic" and said that it is often preoccupied with the "philosophical conundrum... what is reality?" insisting that: • I grew up in a tradition where there are simply more dimensions to reality: legends and myths and ancestors and spirits and death... Which brings the question: what is reality? Everyone's reality is different. For different perceptions of reality we need a different language. We like to think that the world is rational and precise and exactly how we see it, but something erupts in our reality which makes us sense that there's more to the fabric of life. I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality. Okri has noted the effect of personal choices: "Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world." As well as novels, Okri's published books include collections of poetry, essays and short stories. His short fiction has been described as more realistic and less fantastic than his novels, but it also depicts Africans in communion with spirits, while his poetry and nonfiction have a more overt political tone, focusing on the potential of Africa and the world to overcome the problems of modernity. Okri has also written plays and film scripts, such as the text to Peter Krüger's film N – The Madness of Reason, which won the 2015 Ensor Award for Best Film. In 2018, Okri adapted Albert Camus's novella The Outsider as a play for the Print Room at The Coronet Theatre. In April 2019, Okri gave the keynote address at the second Berlin African Book Festival, curated by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Okri's volume of collected poems, A Fire in My Head: Poems for the Dawn, was published in 2021, its title inspired by a line in Wole Soyinka's poem "Death in the Dawn": "May you never walk / when the road waits, famished." Alongside his writing, Okri has maintained an interest in visual art since his youth, and in 2023, he collaborated with colourist painter Rosemary Clunie in Firedreams, at the Bomb Factory, Marylebone, an exhibition of "WordArt" that featured large-scale paintings and sculptural obstructions. Okri and Clunie, his long-time friend, had previously brought together their paintings and stories in the 2017 book The Magic Lamp: Dreams of Our Age.

• Flowers and Shadows (Harlow: Longman, 1980) • The Landscapes Within (Harlow: Longman, 1981) • The Famished Road (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991) • Songs of Enchantment (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993) • Astonishing the Gods (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995) • Dangerous Love (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996) • Infinite Riches (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998) • In Arcadia (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002) • Starbook (London: Rider Books, 2007) • The Age of Magic (London: Head of Zeus, 2014) • The Freedom Artist (London: Head of Zeus, 2019) • Every Leaf a Hallelujah (London: Head of Zeus, 2021) • The Last Gift of the Master Artists (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022) • Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025)

• Rise Like Lions: Poetry for the Many (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2018) • African Stories (London: Everyman's Library Pocket Classics, 2025)

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• Audio: Ben Okri in conversation on the BBC World Service discussion programme The Forum, 19 July 2009. • Ben Okri on RSA Audio, 4 April 2011. • Simon Joseph Jones, "Soul Man | Ben Okri" (interview), High Profiles, 31 October 2002. • Ben Okri: transcript of interview for the Why Are We Here? documentary series. • "Ben Okri on the Strange Magic of Our Preoccupations". In Conversation with Mitzi Rapkin on the First Draft Podcast; via Literary Hub, February 8, 2021.

• "O That Abstract Garden", a poem by Ben Okri.. • "The Awakening Age", on the line millennium poem by Okri. • "Poetic tribute to England clash", BBC News, 11 June, 2002. "Draw" – a poem written by Okri to mark the England World Cup match with Nigeria. • "40 Artists, 40 Days", Tate, 2012. "Lines in Potentis", a poem by Okri.. • "Children of the Dream", The Guardian, 21 August 2003 – a poem by Okri celebrating the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. • "Dancing With Change" (Ode Wire, April 2007 issue), a poem by Ben Okri. • "I sing a new freedom" (Ebury Publishing, 3 April 2009), a poem by Ben Okri. • "As clouds pass above our heads..." (Ebury Publishing, 2 February 2010), a poem by Ben Okri.

Ben Okri is recorded as having received Officer of the Order of the British Empire, Booker Prize and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.