15 Facts About Biyi Bandele

Biyi Bandele was the author of several novels, beginning with The Man Who Came in From the Back of Beyond, as well as writing stage plays, before turning his focus to filmmaking.

Biyi Bandele's father Solomon Bandele-Thomas was a veteran of the Burma Campaign in World War II, while Nigeria was still part of the British Empire.

Biyi Bandele 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.

Biyi Bandele won the International Student Playscript competition of 1989 with an unpublished play, Rain, before claiming the 1990 British Council Lagos Award for a collection of poems.

Biyi Bandele moved to London in 1990, at the age of 22, armed with the manuscripts of two novels.

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

Biyi Bandele worked with London's Royal Court Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as writing radio drama and screenplays for television.

Biyi Bandele's plays include: Rain; Marching for Fausa ; Resurrections in the Season of the Longest Drought ; Two Horsemen, selected as Best New Play at the 1994 London New Plays Festival; Death Catches the Hunter and Me and the Boys ; and Oroonoko, an adaptation for the RSC of Aphra Behn's 17th-century novel of the same name.

In 1997, Biyi Bandele did a successful dramatisation of Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel Things Fall Apart.

Biyi Bandele acted as Royal Literary Fund Resident Playwright at the Bush Theatre from 2002 to 2003.

Biyi Bandele wrote of the impact on him of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which he saw on a hire-purchase television set in a railway town in northern Nigeria:.

At the time of his death, Biyi Bandele had been working on a new novel, entitled Yoruba Boy Running, which had been due to be published in 2023, and was rescheduled for July 2024.

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

Biyi 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.

Biyi Bandele died in Lagos on 7 August 2022 at the age of 54.