Simi Bedford is a Nigerian novelist based in Britain. Her 1991 debut book Yoruba Girl Dancing, an autobiographical novel about a young Nigerian girl who is sent to England to receive a private school education, was well reviewed on publication and was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 abridgement.Hodapp, James, "The Proto-Afropolitan Bildungsroman: Yoruba Women, Resistance, and the Nation in Simi Bedford's Yoruba Girl Dancing", The Global South, Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2016, pp. 130–149. Her second novel, Not With Silver, was published in 2007.
Biography Bedford was born in Lagos, Nigeria,Leese, Peter, Britain Since 1945: Aspects of Identity, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 50. to parents who had come there from Sierra Leone.Simi Bedford interview on Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4, 25 July 2007. YouTube. Her great-grandparents were from Nigeria and were rescued from a slave ship. Bedford spent her early years in Lagos, before being sent for her education to Britain, where she attended boarding-school from the age of six."Simi Bedford", Black British Women Writers.
She read law at Durham University, and subsequently worked in the media, including as a radio presenter and a television researcher. Living in London, she married and raised three children. She is now divorced from her artist husband, Martin Bedford, but they still maintain a friendly relationship, even sharing space together in a house in Devon.
Writing Bedford's debut novel Yoruba Girl Dancing is semi-autobiographical, recounting the experience of a Nigerian girl's education in Britain, which Francine Prose described in a Washington Post review as: "[b]eautifully written ... at once acerbic and moving, painfully honest about the cost of emigration and adjustment."Prose, Francine (27 September 1992), "England through young African eyes", Washington Post. A five-part abridgement of Yoruba Girl Dancing (by Margaret Busby, read by Adjoa Andoh and produced by David Hunter) was broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime in October 1991."Listings", Radio Times, Issue 3539, 23 October 1991, p. 93. The novel is extracted in Busby's 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa.Busby, Margaret (9 March 2019), "From Ayòbámi Adébáyò to Zadie Smith: meet the New Daughters of Africa", The Guardian.New Daughters of Africa contributors, Myriad Editions.
Bedford's second novel, Not With Silver (2007), is historical fiction, focusing on mid-18th-century West Africa, slavery and court intrigue. Drawing on its author's own ancestral history, Not With Silver is unique among books about slavery in depicting the lives of people in Africa before they were enslaved. The Spectators reviewer concluded: "This relentlessly honest book has no false or sentimental notes, absolutely no prettifying. A black warrior facing unexpected danger is taught to imagine the worst, 'look the leopard in the eye.' Simi Bedford does just that. A brave and uncomfortable labour of love."Durrant, Digby, "Pity the oppressed; fear the oppressed", The Spectator, 7 November 2007.
Bibliography Yoruba Girl Dancing, London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1991, ; Mandarin, 1991, . Not with Silver, London: Chatto & Windus, 2007, ; Vintage (paperback), 2008, .
References
External links
Radio interview from 2007.