Biyi Bandele

Bandele's writing encompassed fiction, theatre, journalism, television, film and radio.

He worked with London's Royal Court Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as writing radio drama and screenplays for television.[11] His plays include: Rain;[12] Marching for Fausa (1993);[13] Resurrections in the Season of the Longest Drought (1994);[14] Two Horsemen (1994),[15] selected as Best New Play at the 1994 London New Plays Festival; Death Catches the Hunter and Me and the Boys[16] (published together in one volume, 1995); and Oroonoko, an adaptation of Aphra Behn's 17th-century novel of the same name.[17] In 1997, Bandele did a successful dramatisation of Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel Things Fall Apart.[3] Brixton Stories, Bandele's stage adaptation of his own novel The Street (1999), premiered in 2001[18] and was published in one volume with his play Happy Birthday Mister Deka, which premiered in 1999.[19][20] He also adapted Lorca's play Yerma in 2001.[3]

Bandele was writer-in-residence with Talawa Theatre Company from 1994 to 1995,[21] resident dramatist with the Royal National Theatre Studio (1996),[22] the Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, in 2000–01.[23] He also acted as Royal Literary Fund Resident Playwright at the Bush Theatre from 2002 to 2003.[1][24]

Bandele wrote of the impact on him of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956), which he saw on a hire-purchase television set in a railway town in northern Nigeria:[25]

And so although I had yet to set foot outside Kafanchan, although I knew nothing about postwar British society, or the Angry Young Men, or anything about Osborne when I met Jimmy Porter on the screen... there was no need for introductions: I had known Jimmy all my life.

Bandele at the Göteborg Book Fair 2010

Bandele's novels, which include The Man Who Came in from the Back of Beyond (1991) and The Street (1999), have been described as "rewarding reading, capable of wild surrealism and wit as well as political engagement".[26] His 2007 novel, Burma Boy, reviewed in The Independent by Tony Gould, was called "a fine achievement" and lauded for providing a voice for previously unheard Africans.[27][28]

At the time of his death Bandele had been working on a new novel, entitled Yorùbá Boy Running, to be published in 2023.[8]

His directorial debut film, Half of a Yellow Sun – based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – was screened in the Special Presentation section at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF),[29] and received a "rapturous reception".[30] The film received a wide range of critical attention.[31][32][33][34]

He also directed the third season of the popular MTV drama series, Shuga, which aired in 2013.

His 2015 film, entitled Fifty, was included in the London Film Festival.[35]

In 2022, he directed the first Netflix Nigerian Original series Blood Sisters.

Bandele directed the Netflix and Ebonylife TV co-production Elesin Oba, The King's Horseman, the screen adaptation of Wole Soyinka's stage play Death and the King's Horseman, which premiered at Toronto International Film Festival in September 2022.[36][37] Characterised by Variety as a "passion project" for the director,[38] Elesin Oba, The King's Horseman was "the first-ever Yoruba-language film to premiere at TIFF in the Special Presentation category, and then onto Netflix".[39]