Biyi Bandele

Biyi Bandele studied at Obafemi Awolowo University. The recorded working language is English, Nigerian Pidgin and Yoruba. Employment is recorded with Royal Court Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company and Talawa Theatre Company. Works named in the authority record are The Street and Half of a Yellow Sun.

Bandele was born to Yoruba parents in Kafanchan, Kaduna State, northern Nigeria, in 1967. His father Solomon Bandele-Thomas was a veteran of the Burma campaign in World War II, while Nigeria was still part of the British Empire. In a 2013 interview with This Day newspaper, Bandele said of his ambitions to become a writer: "When I was a child, I remembered war was something that sprang up a lot in conversations on the part of my dad.... That was probably one of the things that turned me into a writer." When he was 14 years old, Bandele won a short-story competition. He spent the first 18 years of his life in the north-central part of the country, later moving to Lagos in the southwestern region of Nigeria, then in 1987 he studied drama at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, having already begun work on his first novel. He won the International Student Playscript competition of 1989 with an unpublished play, Rain, before claiming the 1990 British Council Lagos Award for a collection of poems. Bandele moved to London, England, in 1990, at the age of 22, armed with the manuscripts of two novels. In 1991, his debut novel The Man Who Came in From the Back of Beyond was published, followed by The Sympathetic Undertaker: and Other Dreams, and he was given a commission by the Royal Court Theatre. In 1992, he was awarded an Arts Council of Great Britain writers bursary to continue his writing.

Bandele's writing encompassed fiction, theatre, journalism, television, film and radio. He worked with London's Royal Court Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), as well as writing radio drama and screenplays for television. His plays include: Rain; Marching for Fausa (1993); Resurrections in the Season of the Longest Drought (1994); Two Horsemen (1994), selected as Best New Play at the 1994 London New Plays Festival; Death Catches the Hunter and Me and the Boys (published together in one volume, 1995); and Oroonoko, an adaptation for the RSC of Aphra Behn's 17th-century novel of the same name. In 1997, Bandele did a successful dramatisation of Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel Things Fall Apart. Brixton Stories, Bandele's stage adaptation of his own novel The Street (1999), premiered in 2001 and was published in one volume with his play Happy Birthday Mister Deka, which premiered in 1999. He also adapted Lorca's play Yerma in 2001. Bandele was writer-in-residence with Talawa Theatre Company from 1994 to 1995, resident dramatist with the Royal National Theatre Studio (1996), the Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, in 2000–01. He also acted as Royal Literary Fund Resident Playwright at the Bush Theatre from 2002 to 2003. Bandele wrote of the impact on him of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger (1956), which he saw on a hire-purchase television set in a railway town in northern Nigeria: 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'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". 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. At the time of his death, Bandele had been working on a new novel, entitled Yorùbá Boy Running, which had been due to be published in 2023, and was subsequently rescheduled for July 2024. The novel, which includes an Introduction by Wole Soyinka, was partly inspired by the life of Bándélé's great-grandfather, who had been formerly enslaved, like the novel's protagonist, Samuel Ajayi Crowther. Helon Habila, reviewing Yorùbá Boy Running in The Guardian (London), writes: "The fictional Crowther's story, as well as the real-life one, is a remarkable saga of perseverance, dedication and triumph over adversity.... What Bándélé brings to this well-known story is his ability slowly and painstakingly to build his protagonist’s character, not just as the public figure known to every schoolchild in Nigeria – the first black man to be ordained a bishop by the Anglican Church of England, the first African to earn a degree from the University of Oxford – but also as a father, a son, a husband and a citizen....The editors have done a great job of ordering and signposting the different sections with dates and thematic headings, making it easier to follow the sometimes intricate chronology of the narrative. We are lucky and grateful that the author was able to leave us with this bookend to his glorious if truncated career that began long ago in Kafanchan, Nigeria, when he started running towards a distinguished future in faraway London."

Bandele's writing explores themes of migration, memory, identity, war, political change, and everyday life in postcolonial Africa. Literary critics have noted his ability to combine humour, satire, and historical reflection while examining the social realities of Nigeria and the African diaspora. His fiction frequently blends realism with elements of oral storytelling, creating narratives that draw on both African literary traditions and modern experimental techniques. Critics have also highlighted his portrayal of ordinary individuals navigating political instability, social transformation, and cultural displacement.

There were plans by galleries in London and New York to exhibit Bandele's photographs of street life in Lagos.

Half of a Yellow Sun – feature film, 2013 Fifty – feature film, 2015 Shuga – television series, Season 3 (Shuga Naija), 2013 Blood Sisters – Netflix Nigerian Original series, 2022 Elesin Oba, The King's Horseman – Ebonylife TV / Netflix co-production, feature film, 2022