Ben Okri

Robert Fraser (The Open University)
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The novels, poems and essays of the Nigerian-born author Ben Okri offer a challenge to received notions of literary convention and form. His reputation was consolidated in 1991 when

The Famished Road

– the first novel in a sequence of that title – won the Booker McConnell Prize for Fiction, but is yet to be matched by an equivalent critical understanding, or a considered body of commentary that might sustain it. Okri has been dubbed a “Magic Realist”, a term that does not really fit him. Meanwhile, the Ghanaian critic Ato Quayson has expounded his work via a revolutionary concept of “interdiscursivity”, the fusion of literary and oral influences within a nation-based text. More conventionally, the British critic Gerald Moore has construed his fiction with the help of Mikhail…

2067 words

Citation: Fraser, Robert. "Ben Okri". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 March 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3405, accessed 19 March 2024.]

3405 Ben Okri 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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