Ben Okri

Ben Okri is a Nigerian-born British novelist and poet whose fiction often blends realism with myth and the supernatural. His novel The Famished Road won the 1991 Booker Prize.

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The Famished Road: A 1991 novel by Ben Okri about Azaro, a spirit child living amid poverty and political unrest in Nigeria. This Booker Prize-winning novel is Okri’s best-known work.
Nigeria: A country in West Africa, independent of Britain since 1960. Okri was born in Nigeria, and the country shapes the settings of many works.
Wole Soyinka: A Nigerian playwright, poet, and essayist who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986. Soyinka is a major Nigerian literary predecessor whose international recognition shaped the context for Okri’s career.
1991 Booker Prize: The Booker Prize awarded to Ben Okri for The Famished Road in 1991. The award made Okri the first Black writer to win the Booker Prize.
The Freedom Artist: A 2019 novel by Ben Okri about a society where people disappear after seeking freedom. It shows Okri extending his political and visionary fiction into a dystopian setting.
London: The capital city of England and the United Kingdom. Okri moved to London as a child and developed much of his literary career there.
Chinua Achebe: A Nigerian novelist and critic best known for Things Fall Apart. Achebe’s influential fiction provides an earlier point of comparison for Okri’s writing about Nigeria.
Man Booker International Prize: A literary prize awarded from 2005 to 2015 for an author’s body of work, later replaced by the International Booker Prize. Its lifetime-achievement format differs from the novel-specific Booker Prize Okri won.
An African Elegy: A poetry collection by Ben Okri, published in 1992. The collection offers a direct example of his work as a poet.
University of Essex: A public research university in Essex, England, founded in 1964. Okri studied comparative literature there before establishing himself as a novelist.