Ben Okri Books in Order

Okri's early novel follows Omovo, a young Lagos painter whose artistic ambitions collide with poverty, censorship, and the pressure of everyday life. It is a close portrait of an artist trying to see clearly in a damaged city.

These stories move from the Nigerian civil war and Lagos streets to the spirit world and a fraying British inner city. Okri keeps testing the line between the known and the unknown, often through the eyes of the vulnerable.

These stories are set in Lagos and the Nigerian interior, where blackouts, curfews, and violence push ordinary people toward nightmare. Even so, humor, resilience, and the possibility of love keep breaking through.

Young Jeffia Okwe loses his innocence as a chain of disturbing events exposes his father's ruthlessness and the moral rot around him. Set in Lagos, it is an early coming-of-age novel with sharp social edges.

Azaro, a spirit child, chooses life among poor but loving parents in a turbulent city. His story moves between street-level hardship and the spirit realm, making both feel equally immediate and real.

Okri's first poetry collection turns political and economic pain into dreamlike, searching images. Again and again, the poems move toward renewal, even when they begin in loss, hardship, or disillusion.

Azaro's adventures continue as dream logic, poverty, and politics tighten around his family and community. The sequel widens the first novel's world while keeping the same mix of danger, wonder, and hard-won love.

A young man enters a realm of invisible beings and begins to learn the rules of their strange utopia. The novel works like a fable about perception, suffering, belonging, and what it means to be truly seen.

These two prose pieces return to some of Okri's central concerns, the power of words and the place of the storyteller in a changing world. The result is brief, reflective, and quietly spiritual.

In post-civil-war Lagos, a young artist struggles to protect his work and his heart as corruption, poverty, and his love for a married woman close in around him. It is intimate, social, and quietly devastating.

Okri's essays move between art, politics, creativity, and storytelling with the same searching intelligence as his fiction. Personal in tone but broad in reach, the book asks how freedom can be lived as well as imagined.

Azaro's story reaches its final stage as his father is imprisoned and his mother fights for justice. The spirit world and the political world press in at once, pushing the trilogy toward a fierce close.

This collaborative art volume centers on Alfredo Jaar's Rwanda installations, pairing images and critical writing with work by Okri. It becomes a meditation on witness, memory, and the burden images have to carry.

This long poem confronts racism, intolerance, slavery, and environmental ruin while refusing despair. Okri looks hard at the past and present, then insists that the future is still something people can shape.

A mismatched group accepts a cryptic invitation and travels from London to Paris, following the mystery of a Poussin painting. Their journey becomes a meditation on art, history, and enlightenment.

A prince and a maiden fall into a fragile love story in a mythical land where a golden age is ending. Okri turns their fate into a parable about creativity, suffering, wisdom, and transcendence.

Here Okri lets story and poem meet in a compressed, dreamlike form. Strange figures, fleeting encounters, and postwar images build a sequence of short pieces that keep circling freedom and perception.

This linked essay collection moves through childhood, beauty, education, self-censorship, and crisis with a poet's eye. Okri asks what stories, imagination, and freedom might still do in a damaged world.

These poems range through love, grief, memory, nature, war, and freedom. Okri keeps returning to the wild edge where feeling, imagination, and the elemental world meet and alter the way we see.

Eight filmmakers arrive at a Swiss hotel by a luminous lake, with a mysterious mountain watching over them. Over three strange days and nights, each is unsettled, illuminated, and changed in different ways.

This brief nonfiction work gathers a poem, reflections on storytelling, practical notes for modern storytellers, and a final stoku. It is a compact, thoughtful look at why stories matter and how they work.

Created with painter Rosemary Clunie, this book pairs twenty-five paintings with twenty-five short tales for adults. The stories feel like modern fairy tales, strange and luminous, with one eye on the present world.

In this curated anthology, Okri gathers political poems and songs from many voices, tracing how lyric language carries protest, truth, anger, and hope. It is both a collection and a case for poetry as public speech.

This collection gathers twenty-three stories that move across places, moods, and realities, from detectives and mirrors to war and loss. Darkness, humor, myth, and terror sit side by side throughout.

The title story anchors this volume, which also includes thirteen stokus, Okri's hybrid form between story and haiku. The pieces are light on the page but slow-burning, each one testing what freedom might feel like.

In a fearful world shaped by lies, prisons, and power, a young man searches for the woman he loves after she vanishes. The quest becomes a dark fable about truth, justice, and freedom.

These poems respond directly to the crises of recent years, including racism, the refugee crisis, Grenfell, the pandemic, and political hope. The collection is angry when it needs to be, but never without tenderness.

In this stage adaptation of the ancient Egyptian tale of Sinuhe, two actors play a whole kingdom's worth of roles. Okri uses exile, return, and reinvention to explore migration and the remaking of a life.

Mangoshi must journey into the forest to find a rare flower that may save her mother and her village. It is a simple, urgent fable about trees, listening, and the cost of ignoring nature.

Two lovers meet by an African river and promise to return, but only one does. From that beginning, Okri opens out into a lost civilization standing on the edge of the Atlantic slave trade.

Inspired by environmental activism, this mixed collection blends poems, stories, essays, a letter, and an interview. Okri imagines messages from a damaged future and asks what must change before it is too late.

Viv creates a masked festival for the brokenhearted at a dreamlike chateau in the south of France. Over one charged night of disguises, desire, and uncertainty, everyone is forced to see love and themselves differently.