Ben Okri

Guardian Children's Book of the Year An environmental fairytale made for our times, written to be read by adults and children, from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Famished Road. In the forest near Mangoshi's village in Africa, there grows a very special flower. Mangoshi knows that only this flower can save her mother's life. It can save her village...

[A] whimsical tale of transformation... magic is essential, and Okri can spin it. Guardian Full of rich hallucinatory imagery and enjoyably vibrant symbolism Irish Times What do you do when your heart has been made a wasteland by love? Viv, who’s in the House of Lords, had the idea for the festival on the twentieth anniversary of the day her...

An epic poem touching on issues of racism, intolerance and environmental destruction from Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri. There is much to celebrate in the human journey so far—art in all its forms, advances made in the fields of technology and medicine and, for many of us, the miracle of freedom. But there is also much to regret—racism, intolerance, the...

'A magical take on Africa before the arrival of the Atlantic slave ships – a world of art and artists, lovers, storytellers and philosophers... The beauty of Okri's prose is [...] the overwhelming star of the show.' Independent 'This is a story of a people on the eve of catastrophe. Others can tell of the catastrophe itself. I want to...

An in-depth look at a public art project by David Hammons with an overview of the enigmatic artist’s career Published to commemorate David Hammons’s (b. 1943) public art project Day’s End, this book documents the sculpture and offers broader context into Hammons’s enigmatic work. In 2014, Hammons sent the Whitney Museum of American Art a sketch for a monument to...

[A] whimsical tale of transformation... magic is essential, and Okri can spin it. Guardian Full of rich hallucinatory imagery and enjoyably vibrant symbolism Irish Times Hearts will be healed and hearts broken, but no one will leave this festival as they arrived… Viv has turned heartbreak into spectacle: a one-night-only masked festival at a French château, marking the anniversary of...

Explore the extraordinary imagination of Booker Prize-winner and visionary author Ben Okri – one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary literature. The hero of this novel finds what he did not seek, and goes where he did not intend to go. As I did in writing it. I set out to find one thing, but found another. — BEN...

From Booker Prize-winner Ben Okri: a voyage into the enduring myth of Arcadia and the mysterious painting it inspired. A lyrical novel about art and enlightenment that takes the reader from Waterloo Station in London to Paris and a four hundred year old enigma, the painting by Nicolas Poussin known as Et in Arcadia Ego. We never write the book...

Explore the extraordinary imagination of Booker Prize-winner and visionary author Ben Okri – one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary literature. A group of world-weary travellers discover the meaning of life in a mysterious mountain village. Eight filmmakers arrive at a small Swiss hotel on the shores of a luminous lake. Above them, strewn with lights that twinkle in...

Explore the extraordinary imagination of Booker Prize-winner and visionary author Ben Okri – one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary literature. In The Comic Destiny, Ben Okri brings together poetry and story in a fascinating new form, the ‘stoku’, which offers a key to the true spirit of our times. Refined over many years, these stokus are deceptively simple....

Explore the extraordinary imagination of Booker Prize-winner and visionary author Ben Okri – one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary literature. In a world uncomfortably like our own, a young woman called Amalantis is arrested for asking a question: Who is the Prisoner? When Amalantis disappears, her lover Karnak goes looking for her. He searches desperately at first, then...

When the world ends, only the underground mysteries will save us… A great wall is rising on the horizon and a foreign army is massing on the borders of the small country of Nevereach. As invaders prepare to smash the last of the resistance, three unlikely heroes emerge from the exhausted populace. Mel, Rosa and Apibus, driven by the loss...

When the world ends, only the underground mysteries will save us… A great wall is rising on the horizon and a foreign army is massing on the borders of the small country of Nevereach. As invaders prepare to smash the last of the resistance, three unlikely heroes emerge from the exhausted populace. Mel, Rosa and Apibus, driven by the loss...

'Both a work of lyrical imagination and a warning about the dangers we will face unless we take immediate action' New Yorker 'An artist's ardent plea for change' Kirkus This earth that we love is in grave danger because of us. Forests are becoming legends, rare as unicorns... If we continue to live as we do now, there will be...

The Famished Road offers the profound insight: 'So long as we are alive, so long as we feel, so long as we love, everything in us is an energy we can use.' The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child who, in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria, exists between life and death. He is born into a world of...

A powerful collection of new and recently completed poems by Ben Okri covering topics of the day, such as the refugee crisis, racism, Obama, the Grenfell Tower fire, and the Corona outbreak. In our times of crisis The mind has its powers This book brings together many of Ben Okri's most acclaimed and politically charged poems. Some of them, like...