Like the protagonist of Yorùbá Boy Running, Biyi Bándélé had been running from a young age. At 14, he won a writing competition at school; another award in his 20s, for his radio play script Rain, took him to London in 1990. He hit the ground running there, publishing his first novel, The Man Who Came in from the Back of Beyond, in 1991. This was the beginning of a prolific and multifaceted career that, sadly, came to an end when Bándélé died suddenly in 2022 at the age of 54.
At the time he was putting the finishing touches to his film adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s play Death and the King’s Horseman – a play very much centred on death and redemption and now available on Netflix as Elesin Oba: The King’s Horseman.
