Ben Okri

Ben Okri

Ben Okri
Born (1959-03-15) 15 March 1959
Minna, Nigeria
Occupation Writer
Genre Fiction, essays, poetry
Literary movement Postmodernism, Postcolonialism
Notable works The Famished Road, A Way of Being Free, Starbook, A Time for New Dreams
Notable awards Man Booker Prize

Ben Okri OBE FRSL (born 15 March 1959) is a Nigerian poet and novelist.[1] Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions[2][3] and has been compared favourably to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez.[4]

Biography

Ben Okri is a member of the Urhobo people; his father was Urhobo, and his mother was half-Igbo.[1] He was born in Minna in west central Nigeria to Grace and Silver Okri in 1959.[5] His father Silver moved his family to London when Okri was less than two years old[3] so that Silver could study law.[6] Okri thus spent his earliest years in London, and attended primary school in Peckham.[2] In 1968 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.[5] His exposure to the Nigerian civil war[7] and a culture in which his peers saw visions of spirits[3] at this time later provided inspiration for Okri's fiction.

At the age of 14, after being rejected for admission to a university program in physics because of his youth, Okri claimed to have had a revelation that poetry was his chosen calling.[8] He began writing articles on social and political issues, but these never found a publisher.[8] He then wrote short stories based on those articles, and some were published in women's journals and evening papers.[8] Okri claimed that his criticism of the government in some of this early work led to his name being placed on a death list, and necessitated his departure from the country.[3] In 1978, Okri moved back to England and went to study comparative literature at Essex University with a grant from the Nigerian government.[9][8] But when funding for his scholarship fell through, Okri found himself homeless, sometimes living in parks and sometimes with friends. He describes this period as "very, very important" to his work: "I wrote and wrote in that period... If anything [the desire to write] actually intensified."[8]

Okri's success as a writer began when he published his first novel Flowers and Shadows, at the age of 21.[1] He then served West Africa magazine as poetry editor from 1983 to 1986, and was a regular contributor to the BBC World Service between 1983 and 1985, continuing to publish throughout this period.[1]

For three years from 1988, he lived in a Notting Hill flat (rented from publisher friend Margaret Busby): "I brought the first draft of The Famished Road with me and that flat was where I began rewriting it.... 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 Stars of the New Curfew."[10][9]

His reputation as an author was secured when his novel The Famished Road won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1991,[1][11] making him the youngest ever winner of the prize.[12]

Literary career

Quote from Ben Okri's Mental Fight on the Memorial Gates, London

Since he published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows (1980), Okri has risen to an international acclaim, and he is often described as one of Africa's leading writers.[2][3] His best known work, The Famished Road, which was awarded the 1991 Booker Prize, along with Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches make up a trilogy that follows the life of Azaro, a spirit-child narrator, through the social and political turmoil of an African nation reminiscent of Okri's remembrance of war-torn Nigeria.[1]

Okri's work is particularly difficult to categorise. Although it has been widely categorised as post-modern,[13] some scholars have noted that the seeming realism with which he depicts the spirit-world challenges this categorisation. If Okri does attribute reality to a spiritual world, it is claimed, then his "allegiances are not postmodern [because] he still believes that there is something ahistorical or transcendental conferring legitimacy on some, and not other, truth-claims."[13] Alternative characterisations of Okri's work suggest an allegiance to Yoruba folklore,[14] New Ageism,[13][15] spiritual realism,[15] magical realism,[16] visionary materialism,[16] and existentialism.[17]

Against these analyses, Okri has always rejected the categorisation of his work as magical realism, claiming that this categorisation is the result of laziness on the part of critics and likening this categorisation to the observation that "a horse ... has four legs and a tail. That doesn't describe it."[3] He has instead described his fiction as obeying a kind of "dream logic,"[7] and stated that his fiction is often preoccupied with the "philosophical conundrum ... what is reality?"[8] insisting that:

"I grew up in a tradition where there are simply more dimensions to reality: legends and myths and ancestors and spirits and death ... Which brings the question: what is reality? Everyone's reality is different. For different perceptions of reality we need a different language. We like to think that the world is rational and precise and exactly how we see it, but something erupts in our reality which makes us sense that there's more to the fabric of life. I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality."[7]

Okri's short fiction has been described as more realistic and less fantastic than his novels, but these stories also depict Africans in communion with spirits,[1] while his poetry and nonfiction have a more overt political tone, focusing on the potential of Africa and the world to overcome the problems of modernity.[1][18]

Okri was made an honorary Vice-President of the English Centre for the International PEN and a member of the board of the Royal National Theatre.[1] On 26 April 2012 Okri was appointed the new vice-president of the Caine Prize for African Writing, having been on the advisory committee and associated with the prize since it was established 13 years previously.[19]

Influences

Okri has described his work as influenced as much by the philosophical texts in his father's book shelves as it was by literature,[8] and Okri cites the influence of both Francis Bacon and Michel de Montaigne on his A Time for New Dreams.[20] His literary influences include Aesop's Fables, Arabian Nights, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream,[7] and Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner".[8] Okri's 1999 epic poem, Mental Fight, is also named for a quote from the poet William Blake's "And did those feet ...",[21] and critics have noted the close relationship between Blake and Okri's poetry.[16]

Okri was also influenced by the oral tradition of his people, and particularly his mother's storytelling: "If my mother wanted to make a point, she wouldn't correct me, she'd tell me a story."[7] His first-hand experiences of civil war in Nigeria are said to have inspired many of his works.[7]

Awards and honours

Bibliography

Novels

Poetry, essays and short story collections

Film

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 "Ben Okri," British Council, Writers Directory.
  2. 1 2 3 "Ben Okri," Editors, The Guardian, 22 July 2008.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Stefaan Anrys, "Interview with Booker Prize laureate Ben Okri," Mondiaal Nieuws, 26 August 2009.
  4. ↑ Robert Dorsman, "Ben Okri Archived 16 January 2013 at the Wayback Machine.," Poetry International Web, 2000.
  5. 1 2 Maya Jaggi, "Free spirit," The Guardian, 10 August 2007.
  6. ↑ Juliet Rix, "Ben Okri: My family values," The Guardian, 25 June 2010.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Anita Sethi, "Ben Okri: novelist as dream weaver", TheNational, 1 September 2011.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Interview: Ben Okri – Booker prize-winning novelist and poet" Archived 16 January 2013 at the Wayback Machine., Scotsman.com, 5 March 2010.
  9. 1 2 "Time and place: Ben Okri", The Sunday Times, 3 August 2014.
  10. ↑ Ben Okri, "Time and place", Sunday Times, 3 August 2014.
  11. ↑ "Ben Okri: 'The Famished Road was written to give myself reasons to live'", The Guardian, 15 March 2016.
  12. ↑ "Ben Okri", The Cultural Frontline, BBC World Service, 1 May 2016.
  13. 1 2 3 Douglas McCabe. "'Higher Realities': New Age Spirituality in Ben Okri's The Famished Road." Research in African Literatures, vol. 36, no. 4 (2005), 1–21.
  14. ↑ Ato Quayson, Transformations in Nigerian Writing (Oxford: James Currey, 1997).
  15. 1 2 Anthony K. Appiah, "Spiritual Realism." Review of The Famished Road, by Ben Okri. The Nation, 3–10 August 1992, 146–148.
  16. 1 2 3 Matthew J. A. Green, "Dreams of Freedom: Magical Realism and Visionary Materialism in Okri and Blake", Romanticism, vol. 15, no. 1 (2009), 18–32.
  17. ↑ Ben Obumselu, "Ben Okri's The Famished Road: A Re-Evaluation." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, vol. 48, no. 1 (2011), 26–38.
  18. ↑ Ben Okri, “A Time for New Dreams" Archived 19 January 2012 at the Wayback Machine., an interview with Claire Armitstead, RSA. London, 4 April 2011.
  19. ↑ Katie Allen, "Okri made Caine Prize vice-president", The Bookseller, 26 April 2012.
  20. ↑ Saskia Vogel, "Interview: Ben Okri", Granta Magazine, 7 April 2011.
  21. ↑ Ben Okri, Mental Fight: An Anti-Spell for the 21st Century (London: Phoenix House, 1999), 1.
  22. ↑ "Honorary Degree in Utopia for Ben Okri - Antwerp, Belgium 2010", Youtube, 10 March 2015.
  23. ↑ Jonathan Beckman, "Twitching Fairy Penguin", Literary Review, December 2014.
  24. ↑ "Bad Sex in Fiction: Ben Okri scoops 2014 prize", BBC News, 3 December 2014.
  25. ↑ "N – The Madness of Reason", Blinkerfilm, 9 March 2015.

External links

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