Poet and spoken word performer JJ Bola responds to Ben Okri’s article in The Guardian on the mental tyranny keeping black writers from greatness. Whilst acknowledging the value of Okri’s argument, Bola takes to task what he sees as a…
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…
A true renaissance man, Ben Okri collaborated with Estonian composer Timo Steiner, providing a text as inspiration for New Piece for Piano Quintet. The original composition was played alongside readings by Okri from his novels Astonishing the Gods and The…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…