Ben Okri

Born in Minna, Nigeria, to an Igbo mother and an Urhobo father, poet, fiction writer, and essayist Ben Okri spent his early childhood in London while his father studied law and returned to Nigeria with his family in 1968. He studied comparative literature at Essex University in England.

Informed by folk tales and dream logic, Okri’s writing also treats his family’s experience of the Nigerian civil war. In an interview for The National News, Okri stated, “I grew up in a tradition where there are simply more dimensions to reality: legends and myths and ancestors and spirits and death. You can't use Jane Austen to speak about African reality. Which brings the question: what is reality? Everyone's reality is different. For different perceptions of reality, we need a different language.”

Okri, who served as poetry editor for West Africa magazine, has published numerous books, including the novels The Last Gift of the Master Artists (Other Press, 2022) and The Freedom Artist (Akashic Books, 2019); the short story collection Prayer for the Living (Akashic Books, 2019); the prose-poetry hybrids Tales of Freedom (Rider, 2009) and A Time for New Dreams (Rider, 2011); the long poem Mental Fight (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1999); the essay collection A Way of Being Free (Orion, 1997); the poetry collection An African Elegy (Jonathan Cape, 1992); and the Booker Prize–winning novel The Famished Road (Anchor, 1991). He has also written film scripts and plays; he cowrote the film adaptation of his 2014 novel, The Age of Magic, published by Head of Zeus.

Okri’s many honors include an OBE, Italy’s Premio Palmi and Premio Grinzane Cavour, the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award, and the Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Westminster and the University of Essex. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Okri has served on the board of the Royal National Theatre and as vice president of the PEN International English Centre. He has been a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a visiting professor of literature at Leicester University. He lives in London.