Nigerian-born Booker Prize winner Ben Okri was in conversation with Ghanaian publisher Margaret Busby at The Africa Centre on Tuesday May 6, 2025 in London.
The occasion was the launch of African Stories , an anthology of 36 stories selected by Okri published as part of the Everyman's Pocket Classics.
Speaking on the process of choosing the authors, Okri, who won the Booker Prize in 1992 for The Famished Road said, "in putting this anthology together, I focused on three things: excellence, mastery of form and wide representation of writers on the continent...By the time I was done there was no time for contemporaries. We must respect our elders."
He also spoke about the importance and primacy of the short story as an art form in Africa.
"What is it about the African short story? It is intrinsically poetic, discursive, and essayistic. It comes closest to allowing the richness of the African spirit and it is closest to the oral storytelling traditions of fables and folktales. Our mothers couldn't spend all day telling us novels, so stories had to be compressed into short stories," he explained to laughter.