Author Archives: RAS Intern

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…

Ben Okri: Why do we tell children stories?

08To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. To poison a nation, poison its stories. Ben Okri continues his campaign for us to recognise the true importance of stories and storytelling. “Why do we…

The Simpsons Namedrop Ben Okri

An author knows they’ve hit the big time when they are namedropped in The Simpsons. Ben Okri has truly made the crossover between African literature and popular culture and comfortably inhabits both spaces as The Famished Road is gifted to…

Storytelling and Science

Ben Okri contends that the oldest technology in the world is… Storytelling. “We are storytelling beings” and even our most rational and calculated thought is far better represented as a narrative: Einstein made relativity accessible by the story of two…

Translation in Africa: The Translated Book Awards Longlisters

Forever supplying us with lists of newly published and newly found talent, blogger Bookshy has opened up a whole new world of African authors usually left inaccessible to the strict Anglophones among us. In digging through the archives of the…

Gbagba

Sunday 5 July, 13:00 – 14:00 FREE, Aimed at 8-10 year olds

Ben Okri on the Late Chinua Achebe

“He was a man who answered the questions of his times, the times in which he found himself, in tough, brief, elegant novels and in doing that actually helped to create a language of literature in which many of us…

Okri Engraved on the Memorial Gates, London

Only free people can make a free world. Infect the world with your light. Help fulfil the golden prophecies. Press forward the human genius. Our future is greater than our past.   The last four lines of Ben Okri’s poem,…