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…
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…
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…
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…
What are your thoughts on “African Books to Inspire”? I spend most of my time looking into the screen of my laptop waiting for the right phrase, the better wording of a sentence – sensing semi-formed ideas welling up –…
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…
Africa in Words writer C. E. Hastings has had a long hard look at Tim Parks’ essay, Writing Adrift in the World, and sets out her case against the ‘significance of a geographically specific literary canon.’ Parks brands writers of such…
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…