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Ben Okri
Sir Ben Golden Emuobowho Okri is a Nigerian-born British poet and novelist. Considered one of the foremost African authors in the postmodern and post-colonial traditions, Okri has been compared to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. In 1991, his novel The Famished Road won the Booker Prize. Okri was knighted at the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to literature.
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culture · Nigerian writer (born 1959) · writer · journalist · novelist · author · poet · literary scholar · also Ben Okri, Okri
Born 15 March 1959 · Q315362
36 published statements · 0 followers
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2026· 18 entries
“Living among the poor, I came up against murderers, the semi-sane, people who”
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“I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren”
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“You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone.”
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“When I woke up I found myself in a coffin. My parents had given me up for dead. They had commenced the burial proceedings when they heard my fierce weeping. Because of my miraculous recovery they named me a second time and threw a party which they couldn’t afford.They named me Lazaro. But as I became the subject of much jest, and as many were uneasy with the connection between Lazaro and Lazarus, Mum shortened my name to Azaro.”
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“Maybe one of the worst things that we can do is to diminish the possibility of the universe in our insistence on our description of it.”
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“We have no instrument by which to record the absolute nature of reality, because whatever instrument we use is filtered through consciousness.”
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“When I was about three years old... I realised that words could move the power in a room.”
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“Writing is a way of paying attention to life.”
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“A writer's task is not merely to describe the world but to deepen our way of seeing it.”
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“I am addicted to dialogues... on the necessity to preserve the vitality and energy of dialogues in the third millennium which is “a time of monologues, soliloquies, solipsistic speech in twittersphere... a time in which we talk from our solitudes.”
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“We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.”
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“Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.”
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“Don't read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.”
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“Learn to drink, my son. A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.”
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“The road will never swallow you. The river of destiny will always overcome evil. May you understand your fate. Suffering will never destroy you, but will make you stronger. Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.”
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“We have to find a new art and a new psychology to penetrate the apathy and the denial that are preventing us making the changes that are inevitable if our world is to survive.”
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The Guardian: Ben Okri: ‘What happens when we die? We don’t die. We change realms’
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2025· 2 entries
The Guardian: Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted by Ben Okri review – a slender fable
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The Guardian: Ben Okri: ‘Is A Tale of Two Cities the greatest English novel? Meet me in a pub to discuss’
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2023· 3 entries
The Guardian: Tiger Work by Ben Okri audiobook review – dispatches on a post-apocalyptic world
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The Guardian: Ben Okri on swapping novels for painting: ‘Could these two great rivers of creativity merge?’
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Collaborated with colourist painter Rosemary Clunie in Firedreams, at the Bomb Factory, Marylebone, an exhibition of "WordArt" that featured large-scale paintings and sculptural obstructions
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2022· 1 entry
The Guardian: Booker winner Ben Okri rewrites published novel to drive home message on slavery
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2021· 2 entries
The Guardian: Changing Destiny review – Ben Okri’s sketchy foray into ancient Egypt
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Its title inspired by a line in Wole Soyinka's poem "Death in the Dawn": "May you never walk / when the road waits, famished
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2018· 1 entry
Okri adapted Albert Camus's novella The Outsider as a play for the Print Room at The Coronet Theatre
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1997· 2 entries
Awarded Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1997).
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Okri was elected vice-president of the English Centre for International PEN and in 1999 was appointed a member of the board of the Royal National Theatre
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1991· 3 entries
Awarded Booker Prize for The Famished Road (1991).
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His novel The Famished Road won the Booker Prize
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Making him the prize's youngest ever winner at 32
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1988· 1 entry
“Something about my writing changed round about that time. I acquired a kind of tranquillity. I had been striving for something in my tone of voice as a writer—it was there that it finally came together.... That flat is also where I wrote the short stories that became [1988's] Stars of the New Curfew.”
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1978· 1 entry
Moved back to England and studied comparative literature at Essex University with a grant from the Nigerian government
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1966· 1 entry
Silver moved his family back to Nigeria, where he practised law in Lagos, providing free or discounted services for those who could not afford it
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1959· 1 entry
Born 1959-03-15.
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