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 northern part of the country in the Hausa cultural tradition. 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 He won the International Student Playscript competition of 1989 with an unpublished play, Rain, before claiming the 1990 British Council Lagos Award for a collection of poems.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.
Playwright
Bandele worked with the Royal Court Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as writing radio drama and screenplays for television. His plays include: '; ' ; ' ; 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 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 ', premiered in 2001 and was published in one volume with his play , 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, 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:
Novelist
Biyi Bandele's novels, which include ' and The Street, have been described as "rewarding reading, capable of wild surrealism and wit as well as political engagement." His 2007 novel, ', reviewed in The Independent by Tony Gould, was called "a fine achievement" and lauded for providing a voice for previously unheard Africans.
