Biyi Bándélé was a poet, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, producer, director, filmmaker, and documentary photographer.

 His debut novel, The Man Who Came in From the Back of Beyond, was published in 1991. He followed this with three further novels: The Sympathetic Undertaker, The Street and Burma Boy. His final novel, Yorùbá Boy Running, is published in the summer of 2024.

 He wrote and directed plays with the Royal Court, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Talawa Theatre Company, including Me and the Boys (1995), an adaptation of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1997), Thieves Like Us (1998), Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1999) and Happy Birthday, Mister Deka D (1999), as well as for radio and television. He was Judith E Wilson fellow at   Churchill College, Cambridge (2000-02), and Royal Literary Fund resident playwright at the Bush theatre (2002-03).

His directorial feature film debut, Half of a Yellow Sun (2013), based on the 2006 novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, starred Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandiwe Newton, and his BBC Arena documentary Fela Kuti: Father of Afrobeat aired to critical acclaim in 2020. His final film, Elesin Oba, The King’s Horseman, adapted from Wole Soyinka’s 1975 play, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022.

Bándélé died in August 2022, aged 54.