Ben Okri

Booker-Prize-winning novelist and poet Ben Okri launches his new novel. The Age of Magic, a beautiful work full of poetic and metaphysical revelations. The novel takes the reader on a journey, a magical and a literal one, as a tightly-knit group of filmmakers travel from Paris to a remote Swiss mountain village. Once there, they are compelled to confront the demons they have been trying to escape. 

Okri is considered one of the foremost African writers of the post-modern period. At 21, he published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows, and in 1991, The Famished Road, which won the Booker Prize.  The mixture of the real and the spiritual worlds, in which he particularly draws on the myths and beliefs of his African heritage, has often led Okri to be categorised as a magical realist, although it is a categorisation he rejects. Altogether, Okri has published eight previous novels, as well as collections of poetry, short stories and essays, and his work has been translated into 20 languages. Here he talks to journalist and author Paul Blezard.