Ben Okri

Sir Ben Golden Emuobowho Okri (born 15 March 1959) is a Nigerian-born British poet and novelist. Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions, and has been compared favourably to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. In 1991, Okri won the Booker Prize with his novel The Famished Road. He received a knighthood in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to literature. Ben Okri is a member of the Urhobo people; his father was Urhobo, and his mother was half-Igbo ("from a royal family"). He was born in Minna in west central Nigeria to Grace and Silver Okri in 1959. His father, Silver, moved his family to London when Okri was less than two years old so that he could study law. Okri thus spent his earliest years in London and attended primary school in Peckham. In 1966, 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. After attending schools in Ibadan and Ikenne, Okri began his secondary education at Urhobo College at Warri, in 1968, when he was the youngest in his class. His exposure to the Nigerian civil war and a culture in which his peers at the time claimed to have seen visions of spirits, later provided inspiration for Okri's fiction.

At the age of 14, after being rejected for admission to a short university programme in physics because of his youth and lack of qualifications, Okri experienced a revelation that poetry was his chosen calling. He began writing articles on social and political issues, but these never found a publisher. He then wrote short stories based on those articles, and some were published in women's journals and evening papers. 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. In 1978, Okri moved back to England and went to study comparative literature at Essex University with a grant from the Nigerian government. When funding for his scholarship fell through, however, 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."Okri's success as a writer began when he published his debut novel Flowers and Shadows in 1980, at the age of 21. From 1983 to 1986, he served as poetry editor of West Africa magazine, and was also a regular contributor to the BBC World Service between 1983 and 1985, continuing to publish throughout this period.His reputation as an author was secured when his novel The Famished Road won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1991, making him the youngest ever winner of the prize at the age of 32. The novel was written during the time from 1988 that Okri lived in a Notting Hill flat that he rented from publisher friend Margaret Busby, and he has said: "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."