Sir Ben Golden Emuobowho Okri (born 15 March 1959) is a Nigerian-born British poet and novelist. Considered one of the foremost African authors in the postmodern and post-colonial traditions, Okri has been compared to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. In 1991, his novel The Famished Road won the Booker Prize. Okri was knighted at the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to literature.

Biography

Early years and education

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. Okri thus spent his earliest years in London and attended primary school in Peckham. where he practised law in Lagos, providing free or discounted services for those who could not afford it. in 1968, when he was the youngest in his class. and a culture in which his peers at the time claimed to have had visions of spirits 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."

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

Literary career

thumb|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. 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. 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." New Ageism, spiritual realism,

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."

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,

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.

Influences

Okri has described his work as influenced as much by the philosophical texts on his father's bookshelves as by literature, and cites the influence of Francis Bacon and Michel de Montaigne on his A Time for New Dreams. His literary influences include Aesop's Fables, Arabian Nights, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and critics have noted a close relationship between Blake and Okri's poetry.

Okri also was influenced by the oral tradition of his people and, particularly, by his mother's storytelling: "If my mother wanted to make a point, she wouldn't correct me, she'd tell me a story."

Honours and awards

Okri was knighted as a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to literature, having previously been appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2001 Birthday Honours.

  • 1987: Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region, Best Book) – Incidents at the Shrine
  • 1987: Aga Khan Prize for Fiction – The Dream Vendor's August
  • 1988: Guardian Fiction Prize – Stars of the New Curfew (shortlisted)
  • 1991–1993: Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts (FCCA), Trinity College, Cambridge
  • 1991: Booker Prize – The Famished Road
  • 1993: Chianti Ruffino-Antico Fattore International Literary Prize – The Famished Road
  • 1994: Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy) -The Famished Road
  • 1997: Honorary Doctorate of Literature, awarded by University of Westminster
  • 1997: Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
  • 1999: (Italy) – Dangerous Love
  • 2002: Honorary Doctorate of Literature, awarded by University of Essex
  • 2003: Chosen as one of 100 Great Black Britons
  • 2004: Honorary Doctor of Literature, awarded by University of Exeter
  • 2008: International Literary Award Novi Sad (International Novi Sad Literature Festival, Serbia)
  • 2009: Honorary Doctorate of Utopia, awarded by Universiteit voor het Algemeen Belang, Belgium
  • 2010: Honorary Doctorate, awarded by the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
  • 2010: Honorary Doctorate of Arts, awarded by the University of Bedfordshire
  • 2014: Honorary Doctorate from the University of Pretoria
  • 2014: Honorary Fellow, Mansfield College, Oxford
  • 2014: Bad Sex in Fiction Award, Literary Review<!--http://www.dn.se/dnbok/samsta-sexskildringen-i-litteraturen-utsedd/</ref>-->
  • 2020: Honorary Doctorate of Literature awarded by Nelson Mandela University
  • 2025: Icon of The Africa Centre Award (London) for outstanding lifelong contributions to African literature and cultural patronage

Works

Novels

  • 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 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)

Poetry, essays and short story collections

  • Incidents at the Shrine (short stories; London: Heinemann, 1986)
  • Stars of the New Curfew (short stories; London: Secker & Warburg, 1988)
  • An African Elegy (poetry; London: Jonathan Cape, 1992)
  • Birds of Heaven (essays; London: Phoenix House, 1996)
  • A Way of Being Free (essays; London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson: 1997; London: Phoenix House, 1997)
  • Mental Fight (poetry: London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999; London: Phoenix House, 1999)
  • Tales of Freedom (short stories; London: Rider & Co., 2009)
  • A Time for New Dreams (essays; London: Rider & Co., 2011)
  • Wild (poetry; London: Rider & Co., 2012)
  • The Mystery Feast: Thoughts on Storytelling (West Hoathly: Clairview Books, Ltd, 2015)
  • The Magic Lamp: Dreams of Our Age, with paintings by Rosemary Clunie (Apollo/Head of Zeus, 2017)
  • Prayer for the Living: Stories (London: Head of Zeus, 2019)
  • A Fire in My Head: Poems for the Dawn (London: Head of Zeus, 2021)
  • Tiger Work (London: Apollo, an imprint of Head of Zeus, 2023)
  • African Stories (edited anthology; London: Everyman's Library, 2025)

As editor

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

Film

  • N – The Madness of Reason (feature film, directed by Peter Krüger, 2014)

Online fiction

References

Further reading

  • Irene, Michael Oshoke. 2015. Re-inventing oral tradition in Ben Okri's trilogy : The Famished Road, Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches. Anglia Ruskin University, doctoral dissertation.
  • Abdelghany, Réhab, "A Question of Power: Ben Okri's 'Meditations on Greatness' at Africa Writes", Africa in Words, 24 August 2015.
  • Official website
  • Ben Okri's AALBC.com Author Profile
  • Ben Okri's official Facebook Page
  • Ben Okri's MySpace page
  • Ben Okri's official page on the Booker Prizes website.
  • Full length You Tube video of Ben Okri winning the 1991 Booker Prize.
  • The Ben Okri Bibliography – an extensive bibliography of works by and about Okri, also including a short biography and an introduction to his work.

Interviews

  • 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.

Selected poems

  • "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.