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Ben Okri talks to Sarfraz Manzoor

Fictions: Madame Sosostris

Hay Festival 2025, 

Join the inimitable Ben Okri as he introduces his new work Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted, an homage to TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.

The novella tells the story of Viv, who throws a festival on the 20th anniversary of the day her first husband left her. There, the special guest is world-renowned clairvoyant and fortune-teller Madame Sosostris, not seen since the pages of The Waste Land.

Okri has won many prizes for his fiction, and is also an acclaimed essayist, playwright and poet. In 2019 his Astonishing the Gods was named as one of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.