079Novel· 1991· Nigeria
The Famished Road
Ben Okri
A spirit-child narrates a slum on the edge of independence.
Okri's narrator Azaro is an abiku, a spirit-child who keeps choosing to stay among the living, and through his eyes a Nigerian ghetto teems with gods, ghosts, and political violence. Its fusion of Yoruba cosmology with dense, hallucinatory prose defined a strain of African "animist" realism distinct from imported magical realism.
Its legacy. It won the 1991 Booker Prize, the first for a Black African writer.
- Author
- Ben Okri
- First published
- 1991
- Genre
- Novel
- Theme
- The West African Novel
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