Post/Lov Post/Love

‘Post’ doesn’t just mean to come next or to forget the past. It’s a rupture from the known. It’s a new species, a love-child, a thing giving birth to an evolved version of itself. Our current age is described as post-digital, post-colonial, post-gender, post-dramatic, post-global, post-cultural, post-love. There’s no doubt that something new is cooking, but what the hell is it?

Enter novelist and poet Ben Okri. Claimed by both Nigeria (his birth state) and Britain (who appointed him an OBE in 2001), his work addresses post-colonial, intertextual and elemental concerns – spanning autobiographical and philosophical dimensions.

Okri is a writer well-accustomed to examining the texture of reality. His Booker-winning novel The Famished Road (1991) is, at its heart, a search for the line between individual truth and transcendence; his poetry and his prose are strung through with this same questioning, painted with both tragedy and gentle magic. Okri’s searching extends beyond the frame, too – in poetry about poetry, and writing about writing.

In conversation with Jeff Sparrow, and mirroring the Malthouse Theatre’s second chapter of 2015 – themed ‘Post/Love’ – Ben Okri will explore poetic visions, textual intimacy, the craft of writing and the taming of chaos, against the backdrop of our disorienting modern world.

If, as Okri says, ‘a story is like an interval in the enchantment of living’, is Post/Love the ever, ever after?

Presented in partnership with Malthouse Theatre.