1989 – International Student Playscript Competition – Rain
1994 – London New Play Festival – Two Horsemen
1995 – Wingate Scholarship Award
2000 – EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Award) for Best Play – Oroonoko
Biyi Bandele (born Biyi Bandele-Thomas; 13 October 1967 – 7 August 2022[1]) was a Nigerian novelist, playwright and filmmaker.[1] He was the author of several novels, beginning with The Man Who Came in From the Back of Beyond (1991), as well as writing stage plays, before turning his focus to filmmaking. His directorial debut was in 2013 with Half of a Yellow Sun, based on the 2006
novel of the same name by
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Early life
Bandele was born to
Yoruba parents in
Kafanchan, Kaduna State, Nigeria, in 1967. His father Solomon Bandele-Thomas was a veteran of the
Burma Campaign in
World War II,[1] while Nigeria was still part of the
British Empire. In a 2013 interview with This Day, 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."[2] When he was 14 years old he won a short-story competition.[3]
Bandele spent the first 18 years of his life in the north-central part of the country, later moving to
Lagos, then in 1987 he studied drama at
Obafemi Awolowo University,
Ile-Ife,[1][4] having already begun work on his first novel.[5] He won the International Student Playscript competition of 1989 with an unpublished play, Rain,[6] before claiming the 1990
British Council Lagos Award for a collection of poems.[1][7]
He moved to
London in 1990, at the age of 22, armed with the manuscripts of two novels.[4] 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,[8] and he was given a commission by the
Royal Court Theatre.[4] In 1992, he was awarded an
Arts Council of Great Britain writers bursary to continue his writing.[8][9][10]
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 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'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]
There were plans by galleries in London and New York to exhibit Bandele's photographs of street life in Lagos.[39]
Death
Bandele died in Lagos on 7 August 2022 at the age of 54.[40][41][42][43] The cause of death has not been confirmed. His funeral took place on 23 September.[44]
Bibliography
The Man Who Came in From the Back of Beyond, Bellew, 1991
The Sympathetic Undertaker: and Other Dreams, Bellew, 1991
Marching for Fausa, Amber Lane Press, 1993
Resurrections in the Season of the Longest Drought, Amber Lane Press, 1994
Two Horsemen, Amber Lane Press, 1994
Death Catches the Hunter/Me and the Boys, Amber Lane Press, 1995
^
abcGibbs, James (2004),
"Bandele, Biyi (1967–)", in Eugene Benson and L. W. Conolly (eds), Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, Routledge, p. 96.
^"Leigh, Mike, (born 20 Feb. 1943), dramatist; theatre and film director", Who's Who, Oxford University Press, 1 December 2007,
doi:
10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.24231