March · This Day in Africa
March 15
1959 — Ben Okri, Booker-Winning Novelist, Is Born
On March 15, 1959, Ben Okri was born in Minna, Nigeria, the boy behind one of African literature's most celebrated novels. His childhood stretched from Peckham to wartime Nigeria, and in 1991 The Famished Road arrived, the story of Azaro, a spirit child, woven from Yoruba cosmology into magic realism.
The world compared the novel to García Márquez, and it won the Booker Prize. From spells of homelessness in London to a knighthood in 2023, Okri's journey traces the arc of the postcolonial imagination. A spirit child's road, dreamed between Nigeria and London, carried African storytelling to the highest shelf in world literature.
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