Biyi
Bandele

Biyi Bandele is the director of feature film Half of a Yellow Sun (2013), based on the novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and starring Thandie Newton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and John Boyega for which he also wrote the screenplay. His television work includes Not Even God is Wise Enough, a BBC2 drama directed by Danny Boyle in 1994, and Bad Boys (BBC 2, 1996) starring Clive Owen. He wrote and directed two seasons of the MTV series Shuga. 

Born in 1967 to Yoruba parents in Kafanchan, northern Nigeria. Biyi Bandele left his parents’ house at age 14 to earn his living doing odd jobs, while also going to school and writing his first novel. From 1987-1990 he studied Drama at the University of Ile-Ife, where his play Rain won him a scholarship that brought him to the UK, which he has called home ever since. His plays have been staged at the Royal Court Theatre and have been performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1997, he adapted Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart for the stage, to international critical acclaim, and in 1999 wrote a new adaptation of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. He was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge from 2000-2002, and Royal Literary Fund Resident Playwright at Bush Theatre from 2002-2003. Bandele's first and second novels, The Man Who Came In From The Back of Beyond and The Sympathetic Undertaker and Other Dreams, were published in 1991 and were followed in 1999 by The Street and, in 2007, by Burma Boy, which has been translated into several languages. 

His second feature Fifty, had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival in 2015. He was an artist-in-residence at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, in 2017. He is currently working on a screen adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s prison memoirs The Man Died for the BFI.