Fireside Chat Marlon James and Ben Okri | World Voices Festival 2023

What are the burning issues and obsessions that inflame writers today—or at least the minds of Booker Prize-winning authors Marlon James and Ben Okri? James (Moon Witch, Spider King) sits down with poet and novelist Okri (The Last Gift of the Master Artists, A Fire In My Head: Poems for the Dawn, The Freedom Artist) for an intimate conversation on Okri’s work (which for decades remained unpublished in the U.S.) and his ideas of “existential creativity” amidst turmoil. His writing, as The New York Times notes, “takes on the great riddles of existence — freedom and consciousness, truth and illusion, suffering and transcendence — spinning them into shimmering, allegorical texts,” and is now “resonating with American readers in a moment of national crisis.” pen.org/action