Diran Adebayo: UK Author. Biography, Work

Diran Adebayo is an acclaimed UK novelist and creative writer representing the new generation of artists who have come from immigrant parents. His parents were from Nigeria. His father was a journalist and academic who watched over and raised Diran and his five brothers under very strict house rules.

With his early activities confined to school, Sainsbury's books and the library, Adebayo became a lover of books. His early influences were Wodehouse, Ian Fleming and books on cricket. The rigorous homework regimen of his early life reaped success with a scholarship to Worcestershire's Malvern College, one of UK's esteemed private boarding schools. While there he read Beckett, Sartre and Camus, the existentialists. He was enthralled with The Catcher in the Rye. His father's guiding demands and his own driving creative spirit resulted in a path to Oxford where the young man read law.

Adebayo writes about being black, young and male in a well-paced urban setting of London. Critics have placed him in front among those emerging from the UK multicultural pallet. In his first novel, he has captured the flow and pictures of Brixton life with a prose sharply crafted from street idioms and slang and drawn into unique language and style.

His first novel, Some Kind of Black, won the 1996 Saga Prize. The prize had been set up specifically for first-time black-British writers. Among the many other accolades and awards, his novel received the New Writer of the Year Award from the Writers Guild of Great Britain, the 'Best First Novel' award from the Author's Club, and a Betty Trask Award.

His second novel, My Once Upon a Time, was experimental in structure and proved successful in producing a "neo-noir fable."

Adebayo has worked for the BBC as a writer and producer and has developed a respected voice as a radio and TV commentator. Today, he continues to deliver a good flow of essays and articles from enlightened perspectives for the popular British press.

The Novels

Some Kind of Black is about the life of a Nigerian student at Oxford who has to negotiate between three lives: the university student seeking to maintain status in the elite academic world, the estranged African outsider of Nigerian immigrants, and the street-wise black of urban London. Its themes include black-on-black violence and the apparent weakened state of the black male in a multicultural and racial UK society. How can protagonist Dele find a comfort zone? His sister, Dapo, falls to an ugly racist incident of UK police brutality, and she also suffers from sickle cell anemia. The interracial romance that Dele evolves with the white Andria finally whimpers out toward a realistic regard for the future. In the end, Dele moves from being merely just "some kind of black" toward the other world that would be less confining.

In My Once Upon a Time, Adebayo takes up the challenge of inducing layers of his Yoruba cultural roots into frames of a Western mystery. A rich lady comes to a private detective called Boy. She asks him to find something for her. The something is a mystery and enables the detective to go into the quest of searching for love. This quest enables Adebayo to show off his writer's magic. So much written about in the past, the Thames bridges are redrawn under new, engaging passages with refreshing imagery. Adebayo's people stand as fully involved, intense characters that defy stereotypes. With creative guile, Adebayo does not falter in his ambition nor his energy. He pulls off a favorable tale recognized as a well-crafted, bona fide neo-noir fable.

The Task of Writing

Adebayo speaks of the lonely task of writing. He writes in the night, and the questions of "ethnicity and identity" continue to haunt him. He speaks positively of engaging the younger black writers and journalists-to-be, but broods on the practices of education in the schools of these cohorts. For black students, these practices remain essentially sublevel, lacking real, substantial and purposeful challenges.

Adebayo co-edited a 2005 volume of short stories, New Writing 12, for the British Council. In 2009, he contributed to the widely applauded four-volume selection of short stories, Ox-Tales, commissioned by the Oxfram organization. Continuing this gifted literary outpouring, Adebayo is finishing his third novel, The Ballad of Dizzy and Miss P. and looks forward to a FilmFour screenplay, Burnt, based on James Baldwin's Another Country.

A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Adebayo has become a literary statesman. His voice, with those of Zadie Smith and Monica Ali, among the many up-and-coming UK black voices, extends the creative territories of the once empire nation to well-crafted expressions of new human plateaus.

References

Adina Campu, The Question of Identity in Diran Adebayo's "Some Kind of Black". Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brasov o Vol. 3 (52) - 2010 Series IV: Philology and Cultural Studies. Accessed at http://but.unitbv.ro/Bulletin/Series%20IV/BULETIN%20IV%20PDF/LITERATURE/09_CAMPU.pdf.

John Cunningham, 22 September 2001. Of Wodehouse and Wood Green, Diran Adebayo tells John Cunningham about voicing the black experience. The Guardian. Accessed at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/sep/22/fiction.johncunningham.

Dr James Proctor, Diran Adebayo. Contemporary Writers, The British Council. Accessed at http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth5.

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