Ben Okri
Nigeria’s celebrated literary icon Ben Okri’s The Famished Road has sold over 500, 000 copies since it won the Booker Prize for him in 1991 and rescued him from the jaws of poverty. He has been very prolific with over 8 novels, two collections of his universal poems, plays, essays and other writings making him one of the greatest black writers of all time and the next Nigerian writer most likely to win the Nobel Prize after Wole Soyinka. Okri’s latest novel Tales of Freedom is an experiment in prose and poetry that he called Stokus. But what are stokus?
Ben Okri has the answer.
"The following tales are properly 'stokus'. A stoku is an amalgam of short story and haiku. It is a story as it inclines towards a flash of a moment, insight, vision or paradox," said Okri.
Review
'Tales of Freedom may transport into regions of untold rapture' --Telegraph
'Beautifully distilled pieces of writing that are not without humour...These tiny tales are full of simple, elegant description...These word pictures span a huge range of influences and reference points, from classic literature of the twentieth century back to oral storytelling...Rarely, perhaps, has the love of ideas been expressed as simply and unpretentiously' -- Glasgow Herald
'Moments of genuine poetry and insight'
--Guardian
Book Description
As one of Britain's foremost poets, Ben Okri is rightly acclaimed for his use of language. And as a Booker Prize winning novelist, this skill was shown to particular effect in both "Starbook" (his most recent work) and in "The Famished Road". In "Tales of Freedom", he brings both poetry and story together in a fascinating new form, using writing and image pared down to their essentials, where haiku and story meet. Thus we discover Pinprop, the slave to an old couple lost in a clearing, who holds the keys to the universe in his quirky hands. Then there is the beautifully dressed black Russian on the train, helping to film a new version of 'Eugene Onegin'. Later, in the chaos of the aftermath of war, orphaned children paint mysterious shapes of bulls, birds, hybrid creatures, and we wonder if grief has unhinged them into genius...And who is that woman, who hardly speaks, who presses a tiny flower into the palm of the young boy on the bus, and then leaves his life forever? "Tales of Freedom" offers a haunting necklace of images which flash and sparkle as the light shines on them. Quick and stimulating to read, but slowly burning in the memory, they offer a different, more transcendent way of looking at our extreme, gritty world - and show the wealth of freedom that's available beyond the confines of our usual perceptions.
Birds of Heaven (Phoenix 60p paperbacks) ~ Ben Okri
Tales of Freedom ~ Ben Okri
Astonishing The Gods ~ Ben Okri
Starbook ~ Ben Okri
A Way of Being Free ~ Ben Okri
Incidents at the Shrine ~ Ben Okri
The Famished Road (Vintage Booker) ~ Ben Okri
Infinite Riches (The Famished Road) ~ Ben Okri
Mental Fight ~ Ben Okri
Dangerous Love ~ Ben Okri
Stars of the New Curfew ~ Ben Okri
An African Elegy ~ Ben Okri
In Arcadia ~ Ben Okri
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