Ben Okri
Ben Okri at Salisbury Arts Centre
About the show
Booker Prize-winning poet, novelist and essayist Sir Ben Okri joins Matthew Stadlen in conversation.
About Sir Ben
Sir Ben Okri is a poet, novelist, playwright and cultural activist. He is known for the Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road, the first in a trilogy, and Astonishing the Gods, which was selected as one of the BBC’s ‘100 novels that shaped our world’, as well as collections of short stories and essays. His work has been translated into more than 28 languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has won numerous international prizes. He was a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was awarded a Knighthood in 2023. His latest books are Waking The Warriors and The True Artist Breaks Out of Jail.
Featuring - Ben Okri
Poet and novelist born in 1959 in Minna, northern Nigeria, Okri is considered one of the foremost African writers of the post-modern period.
At 21 he published his first novel Flowers and Shadows and in 1991 The Famished Road which won the Booker Prize. The mixture of the real and the spiritual worlds in which he particularly draws on the myths and beliefs of his African heritage has often led Okri to be categorised as a magical realist although it is a categorisation he rejects.