Winner of the Booker Prize for The Famished Road, Ben Okri is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary writers writing today. Featuring a substantial new interview with Ben Okri himself, a full bibliography of his creative work and covering his complete works, this is the first in-depth study of Okri's themes and artistic vision. Rosemary Gray explores Okri's career-long engagement with myth, Nigerian politics and culture, and with the environmental crisis in the age of the Anthropocene.

This volume marks the 25th anniversary of Karin Barber’s ground-breaking article, "Popular Arts in Africa", which stimulated new debates about African popular culture and its defining categories. Focusing on performances, audiences, social contexts and texts, contributors ask how African popular cultures contribute to the formation of an episteme. With chapters on theater, Nollywood films, blogging, and music and sports discourses, as well as on popular art forms, urban and youth cultures, and gender and sexuality, the book highlights the dynamism and complexity of contemporary popular cultures in sub-Saharan Africa. Focusing on the streets of Africa, especially city streets where different cultures and cultural personalities meet, the book asks how the category of "the people" is identified and interpreted by African culture-producers, politicians, religious leaders, and by "the people" themselves. The book offers a nuanced, strongly historicized perspective in which African popular cultures are regarded as vehicles through which we can document ordinary people’s vitality and responsiveness to political and social transformations.

This volume presents eco-phenomenology’s role in pandemics and post-pandemics and takes up the task of eco-phenomenology as a unified project by not focusing on naturalizing phenomenology but rather exploring the full range of possibilities - such as creative acts and self-individualization – in dealing with ecological threats. Eco-phenomenological developments are based on the main concepts of “phenomenology of life”, as created by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. This volume also uniquely explores the Covid-19 pandemic as a phenomenologically interpreted and ecological phenomenon. It appeals to students and researchers working in the fields of phenomenology and environmental philosophy.

The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature introduces world literature readers to the transnational, multivocal writings of immigrant African authors. Covering works produced in Europe, North America, and elsewhere in the world, this book investigates three major aesthetic paradigms in African diasporic literature: the Sankofan wave (late 1960s–early 1990s); the Janusian wave (1990s–2020s); and the Offshoots of the New Arrivants (those born and growing up outside Africa). Written by well-established and emerging scholars of African and diasporic literatures from across the world, the chapters in the book cover the works of well-known and not-so-well-known Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone writers from different theoretical positionalities and critical approaches, pointing out the unique innovative artistic qualities of this major subgenre of African literature. The focus on the “diasporic consciousness” of the writers and their works sets this handbook apart from others that solely emphasize migration, which is more of a process than the community of settled African people involved in the dynamic acts of living reflected in diasporic writings. This book will appeal to researchers and students from across the fields of Literature, Diaspora Studies, African Studies, Migration Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.

This book examines the depiction of the Delta region of Nigeria through literature and other cultural art forms. The Niger Delta has been thrust into the global limelight due to resource extraction and conflict, but it is also a region with a rich culture, environment, and heritage. The creative imagination of the area’s artists has been fuelled by the area’s pressing concerns of indigenous peoples, minority discourse, environmental degradation, climate change, multinational corporations' greed, dictatorship, and people’s struggle for control of their resources. Taking a holistic approach to the Niger Delta experience, this book showcases artistic responses from literature, visual arts, and performances (such as masquerades, dances, and festivals). Chapters cover authors, artists, and performers such as Ben Okri, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Isidore Okpewho, J.P. Clark, and Bruce Onobrakpeya, as well as topics like the famous Benin bronze figures and Urhobo Udje dance. Affirming the wealth and diversity of the region which continues to inspire creative artistic productions, The Literature and Arts of the Niger Delta will be of interest to researchers of African literature, arts, and other cultural productions.

Starbook tells the tale of a prince and a maiden in a mythical land where a golden age is ending. Their fragile story considers the important questions we all face, exploring creativity, wisdom, suffering and transcendence in a time when imagination still ruled the world. A magnificent achievement and a modern-day parable, Starbook offers a vision of life far greater than ourselves.

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE ‘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’ The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. He is born into a world of poverty, ignorance and injustice, but Azaro awakens with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro's loving parents are made destitute. The tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus's story. 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. ‘In a magnificent feat of sustained imaginative writing, Okri spins a tale that is epic and intimate at the same time. The Famished Road rekindled my sense of wonder. It made me, at age 50, look at the world through the wide eyes of a child’ Michael Palin