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Summary English Home Language - an African elegy
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About Ben OkriBen Okri (born 15 March 1959) is a Nigerian poet and novelist. Okri is
considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and
post-colonial traditions and has been compared favourably with authors
such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez.
Ben Okri is a member of the Urhobo people; his father was Urhobo, and
his mother was half-Igbo. He was born in Minna in west central Nigeria to
Grace and Silver Okri in 1959. His father Silver moved his family to
London when Okri was less than two years old so that Silver could study
law. Okri thus spent his earliest years in London, and attended primary
school in Peckham. In 1968 Silver moved his family back to Nigeria where
he practiced law in Lagos, providing free or discounted services for those
who could not afford it. His exposure to the Nigerian civil war and a
culture in which his peers saw visions of spirits at this time later provided
inspiration for Okri’s fiction.
At the age of 14, after being rejected for admission to a university
program in physics because of his youth, Okri claimed to have had a
revelation that poetry was his chosen calling. He began writing articles on
social and political issues, but these never found a publisher. He then
wrote short stories based on those articles, and some were published in
women’s journals and evening papers.
Okri claimed that his criticism of the government in some of this early
work led to his name being placed on a death list, and necessitated his
departure from the country. In the late 1970s, Okri moved back to
England to study comparative literature at Essex University with a grant
from the Nigerian government. But when funding for his scholarship fell
through, Okri found himself homeless, sometimes living in parks and
sometimes with friends. He describes this period as "very, very important"
to his work: "I wrote and wrote in that period... If anything [the desire to
write] actually intensified."
Okri’s success as a writer began when he published his first novel Flowers
and Shadows, at the age of 21. Okri then served West Africa magazine as
poetry editor from 1983 to 1986, and was a regular contributor to the BBC
World Service between 1983 and 1985, continuing to publish throughout
this period. His reputation as an author was secured when he won the
Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The Famished Road in 1991.
Since he published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows (1980), Okri has
risen to international acclaim, and he is often described as one of Africa’s
leading writers. His best known work, The Famished Road, which was
awarded the 1991 Booker Prize, along with Songs of Enchantment and
Infinite Riches make up a trilogy that follows the life of Azaro, a spirit-child
narrator, through the social and political turmoil of an African nation
reminiscent of Okri’s remembrance of war-torn Nigeria.
Okri’s work is particularly difficult to categorize. Although it has been
widely categorized as post-modern, some scholars have noted that the
seeming realism with which he depicts the spirit-world challenges this
categorization. If Okri does attribute reality to a spiritual world, it is
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