Okri, Ben
Entry updated 8 September 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1959- ) Nigerian journalist and author mostly in UK from 1978, active from the mid 1970s. Most of his novels, beginning with Flowers and Shadows (1980) and including his best known title, The Famished Road (1991), fit loosely into an understanding of Fantastika less focused on its transgressiveness within an anglophone context, than upon a sense that his work does not visibly struggle against imposed conventions as to the real and the unreal. It is clear that he finds such conventions procrustean. This refusal to be seen as outlying a domineering episteme may explain his resistance to a reading of his works in terms of Magic Realism; a tale like In Arcadia (2002), whose quest structure shifts from "mundane" to a slightly scatty, spiritualized Transcendence, is hard to fit into such a mould. Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-Hearted (2025) treats a magical Arcadia based on William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (performed circa 1595; 1600) as analogous to the modernist Ruined Earth at the heart of The Wasteland (1922) by T S Eliot (1888-1965) (see Modernism in SF).
Okri is of specific sf interest for The Freedom Artist (2019), a myth-radiated portrait of a Near Future world transfigured into Dystopian nightmare by Climate Change. A sense that some unstoppable revel is unleashing itself out of the bowels of story sometimes deafens the tales told, sometimes renders the entire tale luminous. In the end, all the same, the rich continue to ruin the world, like the Horsemen of fable.
He was knighted in the 2023 UK King's Birthday Honours. [JC]
Ben Okri
born Minna, Nigeria: 15 March 1959
works
series
Famished Road
- The Famished Road (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991) [Famished Road: hb/Dirk Van Dooren]
- Infinite Riches (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998) [Famished Road: hb/Alan McGowarn]
individual titles (selected)
- Flowers and Shadows (London: Harlow, 1980) [hb/]
- Astonishing the Gods (London: Phoenix House, 1995) [hb/Sue Clarke]
- In Arcadia (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2002) [hb/from Nicholas Poussin]
- Starbook: A Magical Tale of Love and Regeneration (London: Rider, 2007) [hb/]
- The Freedom Artist (London: Head of Zeus, 2019) [hb/]
- Every Leaf a Hallelujah (London: Head of Zeus/Apollo, 2021) [novella: chap: illus/hb/Diana Ejaita]
- Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-Hearted (London: Head of Zeus/Apollo, 2025) [hb/]
works as editor
- African Stories (London: Everyman's Library, 2025) [anth: hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry