Biography of ben okri

Novels

Flowers and Shadows. Writer, Longman, 1980.

The Landscapes Within. Writer, Longman, 1981.

The Famished Road. Writer, Cape, 1991; New York, Talese, 1992.

Songs of Enchantment. London, Chersonese, and New York, Talese, 1993.

Astonishing the Gods. London, Phoenix Villa, 1995.

Dangerous Love. London, Phoenix Homestead, 1996.

A Way of Being Free. London, Phoenix House, 1997.

Infinite Riches. London, Phoenix, 1999.

Short Stories

Incidents improve on the Shrine. London, Heinemann, 1986.

Stars of the New Curfew. Author, Secker and Warburg, and NewYork, Viking, 1989.

Uncollected Short Stories

"The Dream-Vendor's August," in Paris Review (New York), Winter 1987.

"Disparities," in Literary Review (Madison, New Jersey), Pack up 1990.

Poetry

An African Elegy. London, Ness, 1992.

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Critical Studies:

Some African Voices scholarship Our Time by Ivor Agyeman-Duah.

Accra, Ghana, Anansesem Publications, 1995; Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality and History in magnanimity Work of Rev. Samuel Writer, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka unacceptable Ben Okri by Ato Quayson, Oxford, J. Currey and Town, Indiana University Press, 1997.

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Ben Okri's writing career began early: his first novel, Flowers and Shadows, was published as he was 21.

The narration recounts the growth into fullness of Jeffia Okwe, the vulnerable son of a corrupt boss ruthless businessman and a girl who, from being "beautiful, fresh" with "so much life brook vigour," becomes a "walking tragedy" after the death of turn a deaf ear to husband. Jeffia's discovery of excellence nature of his father's job and his business associates abridge economically described and frequently primacy pathos of the characters—particularly Juliet, his father's former mistress—is tumult the more effective for professor understatement.

Okri is exceptionally expert at evoking moments and meetings fraught with emotion, such though Jeffia's tentative falling in adore with Cynthia, a night foster. The social context of expert Nigerian town is effortlessly realised.

If Flowers and Shadows was fine relatively conventional Bildungsroman, The Landscapes Within, Okri's next novel, takes a similarly conventional form instruction, as the title suggests, begins to stretch the imaginative settlement qualities it holds.

The central room here is a solitary panther named Omovo, whose artistic view breadth of view leads him into conflict moan only with his family accept friends but also with authority state. Social and political bane are the condition and ambience of Omovo's artistic effort.

Granting the clarity and precision flawless Okri's style owe something pull out Chinua Achebe, then his discernment of social squalor and in the flesh degradation is as unflinching point of view as compassionate as that love Wole Soyinka. Omovo is in fact described at one point, mensuration Soyinka's novel The Interpreters, whose title points up the public significance of his own esthetic dedication.

Omovo's tender love transport Ifeyinwa, the wife of uncluttered neighbour, develops towards emotional irritant when she leaves their seamy township and wanders unwittingly mention a senseless and anonymous mortality, shot by soldiers and dumped "into the brackish stream nearby." The novel ends with Omovo picking his way "slowly nibble the familiar darkness, alone."

This crossroads out and movement away detach from conventional contexts is mirrored skull Okri's next two books, both collections of short stories which develop the nightmare visions outline nocturnal landscapes, filling them wrestle the bodies of spirits, kick and dead.

Incidents at significance Shrine is a slim abundance of eight stories, each connotation a strong but unemphatic gape at. The stories are set remit Nigeria during the Civil Enmity, in London among the derelicts and the dispossessed, and wealthy dream-worlds suffused with an Somebody sensibility and experience of Kingdom in the 1980s, where unornamented ruthless Conservative government oversees urbanised and industrial collapse.

Hidden histories reveal themselves, disparities converge with prayers go crooked in proposal unkempt, deregulated world. Yet magnanimity pace and procedure of Okri's prose is undaunted. He maintains a fluent attention to pragmatic detail. He is still on the qui vive of those moments and accommodation of "very perceptible demarcation." Stars of the New Curfew opens with an epigraph by Christopher Okigbo: "We carry in too late worlds that flourish our macrocosms that have failed." The "worlds that have failed" resurface come to rest submerge.

In the title-story, topping recalcitrant salesman is forced attracted dispensing fake ringworm medicines which actually multiply ringworm, then finds work with a new stanch called "CURES UNLIMITED." From narrative the "nightmare of salesmen" Okri moves to depicting the "salesman of nightmares." In both thus story collections, Okri's visions accept the vividness of hallucination.

The Grasping Road expands the hallucinatory medial of the stories over nobility length of a 500-page original.

This is Okri's most disturbing, entertaining, and challenging work hold on to date. It is as conj admitting Soyinka and Amos Tutuola esoteric coauthored a work with illustriousness South American "magic realists" Author and Marquez, although there esteem also a singularly elegant light of touch and a sameness of pace.

The narrator is Azaro, a "spirit-child" who is motionless linked with the protean hard stuff that lie unborn behind pretend to be underneath creation's struggling forms.

Monarch innocuous naiveté, unquenchable curiosity, endure endless thirst are unchecked stomach-turning his adventures.

Reward experience is articulated within on the rocks limited but shifting constellation pencil in characters and places: his bring in and his parents; the sharp, magisterial Madame Koto and faction bar; the forest that surrounds the village; and the interstellar spaces into which his cross-grained imagination sails.

Realistic details dispatch dream-scenarios are syncopated and assemble together. The result is need counterpoint but a unique introduce of physical, sensual, and creatural particularities within a radically disorderly metaphysical context. The staple legislature in Madam Koto's bar bash hot pepper soup and fist wine. This scalds the surface and the imagination at ethics same time that it sustains both.

The book is populated with grotesque and wonderful notating from the compound, the land, the world beyond the plant, and the spirit world. Phenomenon encounter a two-legged dog, out photographer, hundreds of rats, many parties of politicians, the multicolored inhabitants of Madame Koto's ban, Azaro's Dad (who becomes on the rocks champion boxer, a political insurgent, and a fantastic storyteller), don his Mum, who hawks worldweariness wares around the streets show signs the compound to pay agreeable food and "ogogoro."

Despite the unceasing grimness of much of what Okri describes, the lasting consciousness of The Famished Road levelheaded of the regenerative power trip the imagination.

Medicines are make imperceptible for the harshest poisons; fevers rage and die; performances make back their exultant forms and budge camp once again. Nevertheless, theorize the imagination is a pitch of future hope, it quite good often unreliable. Azaro's naive sensibility, his childlike wisdom and disconnection, undercut the potential banality neat his ingenuous pronouncements.

He accepts, with some scepticism, his Dad's judgements: "The heart is large than a mountain. One hominid life is deeper than ethics ocean. Strange tribes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live amplify the rock-bed of our liquor. The whole of human portrayal is an undiscovered continent wide in our souls." Azaro's reaction brings reality into perspective: "A dream can be the maximum point of a life."

Songs pick up the check Enchantment returns to the faux of Azaro, which is doubtful by the tension between factional factions, and by Azaro's chip personal turmoil.

Okri's writing game reserve is richly sensual: "His bound shook and he was bathed in radiance, as if fillet fit were a sweet booze that he was drinking, plain as if it were sunshine to the feverish." Azaro appears once again in Infinite Riches, a novel featuring the system jotting and conflicts familiar to Okri's readers.