Ben Okri

Ben Okri

Nigerian novelist, poet, and short-story writer, who achieved international recognition with his third novel, The Famished Road (1991), which won Britain's top literary award, the Booker Prize. Okri had been writing for several years and had published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows (1980). During his three years at Essex, he published a second novel, The Landscapes Within (1982). Between 1984 and 1985, Okri worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) World Service, as a radio broadcaster on the “Network Africa” program. He was poetry editor of West Africa magazine from 1980 to 1987. Critical interest in Okri's writing was first generated by his short story collection Incidents at the Shrine (1987), which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa. Another collection of short stories, Stars of the New Curfew (1988), in which, Okri seeks to present a resolution between African mysticism and Western modernism. The Famished Road is a tale of an African “spirit-child.” Okri's works also include a volume of incantatory poems, An African Elegy (1992) as well as a sequel to The Famished Road, Songs of Enchantment (1993). In 1995 he published Astonishing the Gods, a quest-fable about suffering, power, and fame inspired by the works of Swiss writer Hermann Hesse and Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.