Quarantine Session #47: Ben Okri + Porochista Khakpour

Summary

Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri launches his timely new collection of stories, Prayer for the Living, in conversation with novelist and essayist Porochista Khakpour. Their passionate and poetic conversation touches on the spiritual, political, aesthetic and emotional aspects of writing fiction, and in particular the tension for non-white writers between the freedom to write about universal human ideas and the demand that they represent their specific cultural context. Their conversation unveils the power and necessity of storytelling in our time; as Okri says, "We as the human race are in the Last Chance Saloon of our great narrative... we're holding the bowl of the future in our hands and it's very, very fragile."