How To Be a Success: Ordinary Men Living Extraordinary Lives...

Oladipo Agboluaje - Award Winning Playwright

S.B. Cole Episode 13

Oladipo Agboluaje is one of our best Black British Playwrights, an academic and Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow. Born in Hackney and educated in both Britain and Nigeria. He won the Alfred Fagon prize for playwriting in 2009 for his play Iya-Ile (The First Wife) and his work ranges from the belly laughing satire of The First Wife set in modern Nigeria, to documentary theatre in his play The Hounding of David Oluwale, about a case of police brutality in 1960’s Britain.

0:27 Dipo’s youth in London and Nigeria, surrounded by storytellers.

7:20 Returning to England after Nigeria’s economic collapse.

10:22 How Dipo’s first play Early Morning, about a group of cleaners who start a black revolution reflected his own reality.  

14:39 His greatest struggle when he returned to England. 

17:52 How he got his first play produced

27:33 Nigerian’s irrational self-belief.

28:51 Why the play he is most proud of is The Hounding of David Oluwale, about the only black person in the UK to have gained any kind of ‘real’ justice for police brutality since 1971.  

34:52 Dipo’s advice to young people who want to start a career in the creative industry.

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The Good Man Audiobook

The Good Man on Audible.com

Links

Dipo on Twitter

Oval House 

Talawa 

Dipo’s Plays

Black Plays Archive  

Credits

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