Skip to content

Post/Love

Series

When

Event Status

‘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.

Featuring

Ben Okri

Ben Okri has published nine novels, including The Age of Magic and the Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road, as well as collections of poetry, short stories and essays. His work has been translated into more than 26 languages.  Ben is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has... Read more

Jeff Sparrow

Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor, broadcaster, and Walkley award-winning journalist. He is a columnist for The Guardian Australia, a former Breakfaster at Melbourne’s 3RRR, and a past editor of Overland literary journal. His most recent books are Provocations: New and Selected Writing; Crimes a... Read more

Location

Malthouse Theatre

113 Sturt Street Southbank Victoria 3006

More details

Stay up to date with our upcoming events and special announcements by subscribing to The Wheeler Centre's mailing list.

Privacy Policy

The Wheeler Centre acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Centre stands. We acknowledge and pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their Elders, past and present, as the custodians of the world’s oldest continuous living culture.