Winner of the Booker Prize, Ben Okri talks about his new novel, Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted. He talks to Steven Gale about his inspiration for the book – A Midsummer Night’s Dream and TS Eliot’s 'The Wasteland – its unique, hypnotic blend of realism and magical realism, myth and poetry, bewitching fables, human connections, and the transformative power of festivals.

Ben Okri OBE is a poet, novelist, and playwright. His novel The Famished Road won the Booker Prize in 1991. His works have been translated into 26 languages and won numerous international prizes. In 2019 Astonishing the Gods was named as one of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels That Shaped Our World’.

Daniel Hahn OBE is an award-winning writer, editor and translator with around 100 books to his name. His work has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize; his authored books include The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature and Catching Fire: A Translation Diary.