Name: Ben Okri
Age: 64
Occupation: Writer
Genre: Fiction, essays, poetry
Nationality: Nigerian
Biography
Ben Okri is a Nigerian-born British poet and novelist, born 15 March 1959 in Minna West Central Nigeria. His father is from Warri, Urhobo, and married to Grace, who was a half-Igbo from a royal family. Ben Okri parents Silver and Grace Okri moved to London when he was just less than two years old.
Education:
Ben Okri spent his earliest years in London and attended primary school in Peckham. In 1966, his family moved back to Nigeria, where he practised law in Lagos. During his stay in Nigeria, he schooled in Ibadan and Ikenne, Okri began his secondary education at Urhobo College at Warri.
Ben Okri moved back to England in 1978, and studied comparative literature at Essex University with a grant from the Nigerian government. This time, his scholarship funding fell through, and Ben Okri in an interview, said he found himself homeless, sometimes living in parks and sometimes with friends. He has called this period "very, very important" to his work: In his very own words:
"I wrote and wrote in that period... If anything, the desire to write, actually intensified".
Notable Works
Ben Okri reputation as an author was secured when his novel The Famished Road won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1991, making him the prize's youngest ever winner at 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.
Books
- Flowers and Shadows - 1980
- The Landscapes Within - 1981
- The Famished Road - 1991
- Songs of Enchantment - 1993
- Astonishing the Gods - 1995
- Dangerous Love - 1996
- Infinite Riches - 1998
- In Arcadia - 2002
- Starbook - 2007
- The Age of Magic - 2014
- The Freedom Artist - 2019
- Every Leaf a Hallelujah - 2021
Awards And Achievements
Notable awards include the Booker Prize 1991 for his novel The Famished Road. Ben Okri was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2001 Birthday Honours for services to literature, and knighted in the 2023 Birthday Honours, also for services to literature.
In 1987, Ben Okri won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region, Best Book) for his short stories "Incidents at the Shrine". In the same year, he was awarded Aga Khan Prize for Fiction for his work "The Dream Vendor's August".
His short story collections, "Stars of the New Curfew", was shortlisted Guardian Friction Prize in 1988. Ben Okri also has the Crystal Award (World Economic Forum) to his name, a Honorary Doctorate of Literature, awarded by University of Westminster, and another honorary Doctorate of Literature, awarded by University of Essex.
In 2003, Ben Okri was chosen as one of 100 Great Black Britons. The latest award added to his cabinet was for Bad Sex in Fiction Award, Literary Review in 2014.
Ben Okri, the prize-winning Nigerian novelist, says that he has always been a voracious reader, throughout his life, both of books from the classical African canon such as Things Fall Apart and Ake, as well as timeless classics from around the world.
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