17 Facts About Ben Okri

Ben Okri was knighted at 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.

Ben Okri was born in Minna in west central Nigeria to Grace and Silver Okri in 1959.

Ben Okri thus spent his earliest years in London and attended primary school in Peckham.

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, Ben Okri experienced a revelation that poetry was his chosen calling.

Ben Okri began writing articles on social and political issues, but these never found a publisher.

Ben Okri then wrote short stories based on those articles, and some were published in women's journals and evening papers.

Ben Okri has said 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.

The novel was written during the time from 1988 that Ben Okri lived in a Notting Hill flat that he rented from publisher friend Margaret Busby, and he has said:.

In 1997, Ben 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.

Ben Okri was appointed as a vice-president of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2022.

Since the 1980 publication of Flowers and Shadows, Ben Okri has risen to international acclaim, and he often is described as one of Africa's leading writers.

Ben Okri's best known work, The Famished Road, which won the 1991 Booker Prize, along with Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches make up a trilogy that follows Azaro, a spirit-child narrator, through the social and political turmoil of an African nation reminiscent of Okri's remembrance of war-torn Nigeria.

In 2018, Ben Okri adapted Albert Camus's novella The Outsider as a play for the Print Room at The Coronet Theatre.

Alongside his writing, Ben Okri has maintained an interest in visual art since his youth, and in 2023, he 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.

Ben Okri has described his work as influenced as much by the philosophical texts on his father's bookshelves as by literature, and cites the influence of Francis Bacon and Michel de Montaigne on his A Time for New Dreams.

Ben Okri was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2001 Birthday Honours for services to literature and knighted in the 2023 Birthday Honours, for services to literature.