Showing results by author "Ben Okri" in All Categories

So long as we are alive, so long as we feel, so long as we love, everything in us is an energy we can use. He is born into a world of poverty, ignorance and injustice, but Azaro awakens with a smile on his face. Despite belonging to a spirit world made of enchantment, where there is no suffering, Azaro chooses to stay in the land of the Living: to feel it, endure it, know it and love it. This is his story.

Commissioned by Audible and written especially for audio format this collection brings together six crime stories through the themes of discovery, destination and arrival. Top narrators bring these gripping tales to life acknowledging the Scandinavian tradition of oral storytelling.

From Booker Prize winner Ben Okri: a deceptively simple modern fable with an ancient origin. A young man finds himself living among invisible beings who have built a utopia based on one principle: that we must repeat or suffer every experience until we experience it properly and fully for the first time.

Mangoshi lives with her mum and dad in a village near the forest. When her mum becomes ill, Mangoshi knows only one thing can help her - a special flower that grows deep in the forest. The little girl needs all her courage when she sets out alone to find and bring back the flower and all her kindness to overpower the dangers she encounters on the quest.

Viv, who’s in the House of Lords, had the idea for the festival on the twentieth anniversary of the day her first husband left her. Six months later, crowds descend on the grounds of a dreamlike chateau in the South of France, avidly awaiting the experience of a lifetime, Viv’s inaugural Festival for the Broken-Hearted. Everyone is in fancy dress. No one knows who anyone is. They wander the beautiful woods with just one night to change everything. And to crown it all, a very special guest is expected.

In a world uncomfortably like our own, a young woman called Amalantis is arrested for asking a question. Her question is this: Who is the Prisoner? When Amalantis disappears, her lover Karnak goes looking for her. He searches desperately at first, then with a growing realization. To find Amalantis, he must first understand the meaning of her question. Karnak's search leads him into a terrifying world of lies, oppression and fear at the heart of which lies the Prison. Then Karnak discovers that he is not the only one looking for the truth.

By a riverbank in Africa, two lovers meet for the first time. They make a promise to meet again the next day, same time, same place, but only one of them shows up. This sounds like the beginning of a love story, but it's more than that, for this breath-taking tale takes the listener into the heart of a vibrant world, a complex and intriguing civilization of warriors and kings, philosophers and artists, parents and lovers. A world and culture which is about to end, for glimpsed on the horizon, seen but unsuspected, beautiful ships with white sails are waiting.

Is what you see all there is? Look again. Playful, frightening, even shocking - the stories in this collection blur the lines between illusion and reality. This is a writer at the height of his power, making the listener think, making them laugh, and sometimes making them want to look away while holding their gaze. Stories here are set in London, in Byzantium, in the ghetto, in the Andes, in a printer's shop in Spain. The characters include a murderer, a writer, a detective, a man in a cave, a man in a mirror, two little boys, a prison door, and the author himself. 

From the Booker Prize-winner Ben Okri: a classic love story set in a country trying to come to terms with its past. An epic of daily life, Dangerous Love is a story of doomed love, of star-crossed lovers, separated not by their families, but by the very circumstances of their lives.

Tanas has risen, seemingly from nowhere, to become the modern dictator of a great western nation. Now he is sweeping across the world, subjugating all in his wake. His armies are powerful and fearful, his crocodile-headed commanders conquering with force and with magic. Tanas's reign seems unstoppable, his dictatorship a foregone conclusion. Until he meets a small band of people. They have no weapons, no money, no power, yet together, they form the beginnings of a resistance. But what will happen when the greatest army in the world meets the smallest?

Eight weary film-makers, travelling from Paris to Basel, arrive at a small Swiss hotel on the shores of a luminous lake. Above them, strewn with lights that twinkle in the darkness, looms the towering Rigi mountain. Over the course of three days and two nights, the travellers will find themselves drawn in to the mystery of the mountain reflected in the lake. One by one, they will be disturbed, enlightened, and transformed, each in a different way.

Inspired by environmental activism, Tiger Work blends fiction, essay and poetry to make a powerful and very personal appeal for change. If we continue to live as we do now, Ben Okri argues in this evocative collection, there will be no world left for us to fix. He imagines messages, sent to us from beyond the end, from those who saw it coming—from Africa, Europe, the Americas and the rest of the world—exhorting us to change now. This is a collection comprising two poems and six prose pieces—three short stories, an essay, a letter, and an interview.

In Rise Like Lions, Booker Prize winning writer Ben Okri has compiled a collection of poems that celebrate the many voices of politics, from polemics and rallying cries to lyrics and meditations. Many of these poems have resonated with readers over lifetimes and through generations, from William Blake to Marvin Gaye. In exploring the impact political poems have on ideas, vision, protest, change and truth, Okri demonstrates how the need for this strand of poetry is as great as it has ever been, and its inspiration just as powerful. 

In un mondo di fantasia molto simile al nostro, una giovane donna di nome Amalantis viene arrestata per aver posto una semplice domanda: "Chi è il prigioniero?". Quando Amalantis scompare all'improvviso, Karnak, il suo fidanzato, comincia a cercarla ovunque. È un tentativo disperato e affannato, che sfocia in una consapevolezza crescente: per ritrovarla, deve prima comprendere il senso della sua domanda. La ricerca lo conduce così nei meandri di un mondo spaventoso, dove regnano menzogne, soprusi e paura, e al cui centro si staglia la Prigione

I racconti di Ben Okri, vincitore del Booker Prize, mescolano diversi piani di realtà, sempre in bilico fra oscurità e magia. Storie irriverenti, incredibili, a volte divertenti altre sconvolgenti, ambientate a Londra, a Bisanzio, nel ghetto, sulle Ande, e in altri luoghi noti ma misteriosi, con protagonisti diversi che abbracciano una molteplicità di personaggi umani, e non solo. Ben Okri si dimostra un autore all’apice della sua potenza espressiva, che padroneggia sapientemente il mezzo del racconto per far ridere il lettore, per farlo pensare, per fargli ribaltare completamente il punto di vista su ciò che lo circonda.