ANA MOURNS RENOWNED NOVELIST, BIYI BANDELE
By: ANA
Publicity Committee
The President of the Association of
Nigerian Authors (ANA), Camillus Ukah has expressed sadness over the passage of
the renowned novelist, playwright and filmmaker, Biyi Bandele.
ANA described the death of Biyi Bandele
as shocking and a monumental loss to the book and film industries.
In a statement by ANA’s General
Secretary, Maik Ortserga in Makurdi on Tuesday said ANA President extended his
condolences to the Bandele’s family, literary community and all who drank from
the writer’s fountain of knowledge.
According to the release, “We in ANA
received with sadness and a deep feeling of great loss, the news of the passing
away of Biyi Bandele, a renowned novelist, playwright and filmmaker.”
“It is painful that Biyi Bandele left
the scene at a time the filmmaking industry needs his wealth of experience, but
we take solace in the fact that he lived a fulfilled life in the service of
humanity to the glory of God.”
While noting that death is an inevitable
end to every mortal existence, ANA President said members of the Association
were however consoled that the late Biyi Bandele, distinguished himself as an
astute and exemplary novelist and filmmaker”.
ANA prayed that God in His infinite
mercies grant the bereaved family the fortitude to bear this sad loss and that
the almighty Creator grant the deceased eternal rest.
Biyi Bandele
(born Biyi Bandele-Thomas; 13
October 1967 – 7 August 2022) was a Nigerian novelist, playwright and
filmmaker. Bandele was a UK-based Nigerian writer for fiction, theatre,
journalism, television, film and radio. He moved to London in 1990.
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, while Nigeria was still part of the British Empire. Bandele spent the first
18 years of his life in the north-central part of the country.
Bandele
had ambitions to be a writer and when he was 14 years old he won a short-story
competition.
Later
on, he moved to Lagos, then in 1987 studied drama at the Obafemi Awolowo
University, Ile-Ife. 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1989 with an unpublished play, Rain, before claiming the 1990 British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. He moved to London in 1990 at
the age of 22 armed with the manuscripts of two novels. His books were
published, and he was given a commission by the Royal Court Theatre.
Bandele
worked with the Royal Court Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, 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 in one volume, 1995); and Oroonoko, an adaptation of
Aphra Behn's 17th-century novel of the same name. In 1997 he did a successful
dramatization of Chinua Achebe's 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 Yerma in
2001.
He
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
has written of the impact of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, 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.
Biyi
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.
His directorial debut film Half of a Yellow Sun was screened in the
Special Presentation section at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival,
and received a "rapturous reception". The film received a wide range
of critical attention. His new film, entitled Fifty, was included in the
2015 London Film Festival. He also directed the third season of the popular MTV
drama series, Shuga. In 2022 he directed the first Netflix Nigerian
Original series, Blood Sisters.
He
was announced as the director of the new 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, and is set to premier at the
Toronto International Film Festival in September 2022.
DEATH
His
untimely death was announced on Facebook by his daughter, on 9 August 2022. The
cause of death has not been confirmed.
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
Chinua
Achebe's Things
Fall Apart (adaptation), 1999
Aphra
Behn's Oroonoko (adaptation), Amber Lane Press, 1999
The
Street, Picador, 1999
Brixton
Stories/Happy Birthday, Mister Deka,
Methuen, 2001
Burma
Boy, London: Jonathan Cape, 2007.
Published as The King's Rifle in the US and Canada (Harper, 2009).
AWARDS
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
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