Monday Night Fiction - An Evening with Ben Okri

In a free-ranging discussion at the Al Green Theatre, Ben Okri shares insights into his internationally acclaimed writing. A visionary innovator who combines European literary traditions with those of African mythology and oral narrative, Okri won the Man Booker Prize in 1991 for The Famished Road, the first novel in a trilogy that continued with Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches. His other works include Incidents at the Shrine and, most recently, Tales of Freedom.

"Writing that continually touches the heart. Here is a prose with a tender tread, alive to human frailty."
- The Observer on Ben Okri

Author 

Poet and novelist Ben Okri was born in 1959 in Minna, northern Nigeria, to an Igbo mother and Urhobo father. He grew up in London before returning to Nigeria with his family in 1968. Much of his early fiction explores the political violence that he witnessed at first hand during the civil war in Nigeria. He left the country when a grant from the Nigerian government enabled him to read Comparative Literature at Essex University in England. Ben Okri is a Vice-President of the English Centre of International PEN, and a member of the board of the Royal National Theatre. Okri won the Booker Prize in 1991 for The Famished Road, the first in a trilogy that also comprises Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches. Subsequent works include the novel Dangerous Love, winner of Italy’s Premio Palmi; the short-story collection Incidents at the Shrine, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction; and last year’s Tales of Freedom, a daring blend of austere modernism and magic realism. In 2001, he became an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. He lives in London.