Ben Okri, Modern Griot

Part of Plymouth International Book Festival

Story tellers are keepers of our history, commentators on our present and seers for our future. In this session the internationally acclaimed Ben Okri OBE, winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The Famished Road and one of the world’s best story tellers, reflects on his work and the challenges facing story tellers in the 21st Century.

Poet and novelist Ben Okri was born in Minna, northern Nigeria, to an Igbo mother and Urhobo father and is now considered one of Africa’s leading writers. Much of his early fiction explores the political violence that he witnessed first-hand during the civil war in Nigeria. He left the country when a grant from the Nigerian government enabled him to read Comparative Literature at Essex University in England.

£6 - £8