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Books Yoruba Girl Dancing, Not With Silver | ||
Simi Bedford is a Nigerian novelist based in Britain. Her best-known work is Yoruba Girl Dancing (1991), an autobiographical novel about a young Nigerian girl who is sent to England to receive a private school education.
Biography
Bedford was born in Lagos, Nigeria, to parents who had come there from Sierra Leone. Her great-grandparents were from Nigeria and were rescued from a slave ship. Bedford spent her early years in Lagos, before being sent to Britain for her education, attending boarding-school there from the age of six.
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.
Bedford's debut novel Yoruba Girl Dancing is semi-autobiographical, recounting the experience of a Nigerian girl's education in Britain. 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.
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 Spectator′s 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."