Ben Okri is a poet, novelist, and playwright. He has published many books including The Famished Road, which won the Booker Prize in 1991, The Age of Magic, Dangerous Love, In Arcadia, and Astonishing the Gods. He has published ten novels, three books of short stories, two collections of essays, and three volumes of poems, the latest being Wild. His works have been translated into 26 languages. He has been a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was awarded an OBE in 2001.

Ben’s books have won numerous international prizes including the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Africa, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the Chianti Ruffino-Antico Fattore International Literary Prize and the Premio Grinzane Cavour Prize. The recipient of many honorary doctorates, he is a vice-president of the English Centre of International PEN and was presented the Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum for his outstanding contribution to the Arts and cross-cultural understanding. He also wrote the film script for the film N: The Madness of Reason. He is an honorary fellow of Mansfield college, Oxford. Born in Nigeria, he now lives in London. His latest books are The Magic Lamp: Dreams of our Age and Rise Like Lions: Poetry for the many.

In 2018 he adapted Camus’s The Outsider for the Print Room at The Coronet.

His new novel, to be published by Head of Zeus in 2019, is called The Freedom Artist.