Biyi Bandele Parents: Who Are Biyi Bandele’s Mother And Father?

Nigerian novelist, playwright and filmmaker Biyi Bandele was born to Yoruba parents in Kafanchan, Kaduna State, Nigeria on October 13, 1967.

Much is not known about his mother. However, 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, Bandele said that conversations on war on the part of his father was one of the things that turned him into a writer.

Bandele said;

“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.”

As early as 14 years old, Bandele won a short-story competition, which became the starting point of his writing career.

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

He 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,
• 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, Bandele 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.

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