Ben Okri reads from and discusses The Famished Road

The Famished Road is undoubtedly Ben Okri’s most famous work. In this BBC World Service broadcast Okri reads from his Booker-winning novel and discusses the passages with the World Book Club presenter, Harriet Gilbert. The unmistakeable baritone lilt in Okri’s…

Diallo on Tour

Ben Okri not only penned a poem for the exhibition of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo at the National portrait gallery but toured a writing workshop around the country, inspiring reactions and guiding the public to form these into their own poetic…

Okri Speaks at 5×15

A most extraordinary literary phenomena, in fact one of the most extraordinary in history, began. It swept England, it made its way across to America it started a phenomenal craze, it is one of the most translated, illustrated, published, republished,…

Ben Okri at the PEN Cabaret, 2010

When Ben Okri arrived at the Fourth Annual PEN Cabaret, his first trip to the US in 15 years and after writing poetry for nine months solid he had little choice other than to read poetry. He gives a selection…

Covering The Famished Road

A timeline of various covers for Ben Okri’s The Famished Road shows how publishers play with the novels we love… and our perceptions of the ones we don’t yet know. How does Okri himself visualise this title? Find out at…

Ben Okri on Nelson Mandela

He demonstrated, almost more than anybody else in our times, how you transfigure the great burden of suffering and expectation into forgiveness, grace and dignity. He held the hand of South Africa through its most difficult time and calmed the…

Diallo Discussed: Ben Okri and Dr. Lucy Peltz

It’s a moment in time that constantly travels and in doing so changes its own time that is contained within it; and ours. It makes us aware that history is not entirely objective in itself. Because we have this tradition…

The Famished Road

In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.   So starts the novel that propelled…

Ben Okri on Nelson Mandela

He demonstrated, almost more than anybody else in our times, how you transfigure the great burden of suffering and expectation into forgiveness, grace and dignity. He held the hand of South Africa through its most difficult time and calmed the…