Sir Ben Golden Emuobowho Okri OBE FRSL is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and screenwriter. Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern, post-colonial traditions.
He was born in Nigeria and came to England as a child. He attended school in London and returned to Nigeria with his parents on the eve of the Nigerian Civil War.
In 1978, Okri returned to London and studied Comparative Literature at Essex University. His first novel, Flowers and Shadows was published in 1980. In 1982 he published his second novel, The Landscapes Within, followed by Incidents at the Shrine, and ‘Stars of the new Curfew,’ which cemented his reputation. It was the publication The Famished Road in 1991, that won him international acclaim and the Booker Prize in 1991. The novel has inspired paintings, music, plays, films, dances and been re-issued as a Vintage Classic. His poem, An African Elegy, is a set text in schools. Okri’s collection of poems, A Fire in my Head, 2021, contains the poem, Grenfell Tower, which received 6 million views on Facebook.
Okri is an honorary Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford. In 2019 his novel, Astonishing the Gods, was selected as the BBC’s 100 novels that shaped our world. He received a knighthood in 2023 for services to literature.
From Wikimedia Commons
Image credit; By Metsavend – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33155051
