Biography
Biyi Bandele was born in Nigeria in 1967.
He wrote several plays, and worked with the Royal Court Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as writing radio drama and screenplays for television. He was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge from 2000-2002, and Royal Literary Fund Resident Playwright at the Bush Theatre from 2002-2003.
His plays are: 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 in one volume, 1995). Brixton Stories, his 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.
Biyi Bandele also wrote five novels: The Man Who Came In From the Back of Beyond (1991); The Sympathetic Undertaker and Other Dreams (1991); The Street (1999); Burma Boy (2007): and The King's Rifle (2009).
In 1997 he adapted Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for the stage, and in 1999 wrote a new adaptation of Aphra Benn’s Oroonoko, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2013 he directed the film adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun, and in 2022 his film Elesin Oba, The King’s Horseman (adapted from the stage play Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka) was released. Biyi Bandele died in 2022.
