|
|
| photo: Mat Bray | |
Ben Okri is a playwright, poet, novelist and short story writer. His novel The Famished Road won the 1991 Booker Prize for Fiction. In 2019, the BBC chose his novel Astonishing the Gods as "one of the 100 novels that shaped our world." He is also the author of Prayer for the Living, The Freedom Artist and many others. His new book for children and adults is Every Leaf a Hallelujah (Other Press, February 22, 2022), a story that echoes climate activist Greta Thunberg's message that "no one is too small to make a difference."
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Every Leaf a Hallelujah is an environmental fable for all ages. A love letter to nature. A tale of courage and the power of action.
On your nightstand now:
À la recherche du temps perdu, volume 3, by Marcel Proust. This is a novel about re-capturing the memories of a life, a novel about illusions, and one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.
Fences, a play by August Wilson, part of a great project to capture the African American experience in the 20th century.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Arabian Nights. This is one of the most magical books to read at any age. I devoured it as a child and it continues to breathe its strange enchantments on my life and art.
Your top five authors:
Homer: one of the great fountains of Western narrative
Shakespeare: so great he belongs to all of us
Cervantes: one book and from it a whole literature
Emily Dickinson: love her strangeness, clarity, paradox
Christopher Okigbo: one book of poems, Labyrinths, but what a fractal experience. His prophecy was in capturing the truth of what he felt.
Book you've faked reading:
Have always been happy to own up to not having read some important books. I have deliberately saved many of them to read later. A lot of beautiful works to look forward to reading.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Don Quixote by Cervantes. Now acknowledged to be one of the three greatest novels ever written. This is a book that changed my life. I was one person before, but a different person after having read it.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This tale of love and dangerous illusions, written with some of the most shimmering prose of the 20th century, continues to inspire book cover designers since its first fascinating outing in 1926. The cover of the copy I bought is all gold, and very fitting.
Book you hid from your parents:
Never had to. They were just delighted that I loved reading.
Book that changed your life:
Don Quixote. It is the story of a man who spent his life reading and one day decides to live adventures rather than read them. A masterpiece among masterpieces.
Favorite line from a book:
"My soul looks back and wonders how I got over."
It's the opening line from the introduction to James Baldwin's collected essays, The Price of the Ticket. So much of Baldwin is implied in that line, the music, the courage, the wistfulness.
Five books you'll never part with:
Rare 19th-century edition of Don Quixote.
Rare 19th-century edition of the King James Bible.
An English first edition of Hemingway's In Our Time.
A signed first edition copy of Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah.
A first edition proof copy of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Wanderer, or Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier. A magical novel by a Frenchman who died young in the First World War. It is a tale of love and adolescence, the possible inspiration for The Great Gatsby, and a book by which to determine who can really be your friend.