Ben Okri: ‘What happens when we die? We don’t die. We change realms’

The Booker prize-winning novelist on the art of lying for a living, the cosmic force of love, and gargling loudly Born in Minna, Nigeria, Ben Okri, 67, spent his childhood in Nigeria and London. He published his first novel Flowers and Shadows in 1980 and won the Booker prize in 1991 with The Famished Road. His subsequent work includes Astonishing the Gods, which in 2019 was selected as one of the BBC’s 100 novels “that shaped our world”. In 2023, he was knighted for services to literature. H...

By Rosanna Greenstreet