Ben Okri - The Magic Lamp

**Ben Okri** is one of the foremost authors of our time. This live event will celebrate and illuminate his work to date and include new work specially for the programme. Inspired by Okri’s own words ‘What if we could see our world again with a child’s eyes?’, this hour-long presentation draws on material from more than 40 years of magnificent, uncategorizable writing including *A Fire in My Head* (2021), *Wild* (2012), *Tiger Work* (2023), *An African Elegy* (1992), *The Magic Lamp* (2017), *Prayer for the Living* (2019), *Stars of the New Curfew* (1988), *Mental Fight* (1999) and Booker Prize-winning novel *The Famished Road* (1991). Okri himself has dismissed critics’ alignment of his work with magic realism as lazy, preferring the description of his work as operating with a “dream logic”, often concerned with the “philosophical conundrum…what is reality?”. In his work there is also a political, spiritual and often an environmental dimension. His novel *Astonishing the Gods* (1995) was chosen by the BBC as one of the 100 books that changed our world. He is acclaimed nationally and internationally and in 2023 was knighted for services to literature.