A competition for Irina fans, and an interview with Ben Okri.

Competition for Ragnor Fans!
Closes Friday November 27, 2015

This beautiful canvas poster has Roy Chen's cover art for Irina and The White Wolf, the second adventure in The Ragnor Trilogy. To be in the running to win, answer the questions below, and submit them to the contact form. 

(Clue: all the questions come from the first adventure, Irina The Wolf Queen)

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Quiz Questions to win this art canvas:

​1/ Who was in the painting that Vilmos brings to show Queen Chloe?

2/ What is the name of Vilmos's rat?

3/On Ragnor, is the realm of Pavel in the North, South, East or West?

4/Where do Prince Andor and King Niklas get trapped?

5/ What is the 'lost book' that outlines the creed of Ragnor?

Submit your answers by Friday, November 27 here: Quiz Answers 

Good luck!

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Unfold your own myth....

​Recently, I came across this lovely quote from Rumi:

“Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.”

I love the word 'unfold';  that we each have a myth curled up within us, complete with our own symbols, motifs and ideas. (I also like that 'unfold' is almost a command -- this is part of our essential work.) 

One individual who has unfolded his own myth is the London/Nigerian writer, and Booker Prize winner, Ben Okri. Read a short interview with him below. 
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Three Questions with Ben Okri

​Ben Okri won the Booker Prize in 1991 for The Famished Road. He has published ten novels, three volumes of short stories, two books of essays, and three collections of poems. His work has been translated into more than 26 languages. He has been awarded the OBE, numerous international prizes and honorary doctorates. Born in Nigeria, he lives in London, and was kind enough to be interviewed when he visited Australia earlier this year. His latest novel, The Age of Magic, is a stunning, profoundly considered work of fiction.
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1/  Much of your work has a quality of dreaminess, and yet you have no problem sustaining a narrative. What would you say to writers about the craft of telling a story?

“That what was what I learned first, fortunately. In my first novel, Flowers and Shadows, which I wrote when I was seventeen or eighteen, I had masters such as Maupassant, Ibsen, Chekhov. I had to teach myself formal storytelling. I went from classical to experimental, and now to classical experimental.

“It’s very important that anyone who wants to write should you learn to do that first, because it is much harder to do it later on if you’ve acquired some bad habits of experimentation or innovation. Storytelling should, as the writer’s career advances, become an instinct. It’s not something you can graft back on. I always want to tell young novelists,  leave out all the clever stuff and fancy ideas, and learn the humility of telling a story first.”
 

2/ Where do novels like Starbook, The Age of Magic and Astonishing the Gods come from?


“Astonishing the Gods was a haunting idea that I had from when I was a kid in Nigeria. I carried it with me through all the books I was writing, The Famished Road and all that, and then one day in the summer I just started it. It just turned up. But then a tremendous amount of work goes into getting it right.
           It’s not that ‘anything goes’ in my writing, but I have a logic in each of my books which I follow and I let it lift to its natural place. I follow the logic of each work rigorously, and I follow it in every sentence of that work. So there’s great rigor, but there’s great freedom at the same time. It’s a very strange combination.”

3/What’s your advice for writers and artists?

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“It’s all here. It’s all in the quality of looking. A simple kind of story in the hands of a popular thriller writer is one kind of story. That same simple story in the hands of a master becomes a gateway to a greater understanding of the human condition. It’s not the thing itself. It’s the mind that looks. It’s the mind that sees. That’s what I mean by it’s all here.”