Gabriel Gbadamosi is a British poet, playwright, novelist, and culture worker of Irish-Nigerian descent. He was born in London and raised in the city’s Vauxhall neighborhood. He began writing poetry as a teenager and added plays to his repertoire in his twenties. He graduated from Cambridge University with a BA with Honors in English.
Gbadamosi’s novel Vauxhall (Telegram Books, 2013) won the Tibor Jones Pageturner Prize for Fiction and Best International Novel at the 2013 Sharjah Book Fair. It has also been translated into French. His poems have been published in anthologies including The New British Poetry 1968–1988 (Paladin, 1988) and The Heinemann Book of African Poetry in English (Pearson, 1990), and his essays have appeared in outlets such as Granta and The Guardian. His plays, which have been performed in the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany, include No Blacks, No Irish, Eshu's Faust, Shango, Hotel Orpheu, and, most recently, Stop and Search, staged in 2019 at the Arcola Theatre. He also wrote the play for television Friday's Daughter (BBC) and the BBC Radio 3 drama The Long, Hot Summer of '76, winner of the first Richard Imison Memorial Award. He has undertaken limited-edition book collaborations with visual artists, including Sun-Shine, Moonshine (Artwords Press, 2005) with Conroy/Sanderson and the artist’s book The Second Life of Shells (MH Arts London, 2001) with Mandy Bonnell.
Gbadamosi’s honors include an AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Fellowship at the Pinter Centre, Goldsmiths, University of London in British, European, and African performance. He was also Judith E. Wilson Fellow for creative writing at Cambridge University’s Faculty of English. He won the Mobil bursary for the writing for his play Shango and was Mobil Writer-In-Residence at the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre. He was a Wingate Scholar and a Royal Literary Fund writing fellow at the City & Guilds of London Art School. He has lectured in dramaturgy at the University of Istanbul and was a presenter of BBC Radio 3's arts program Night Waves.
In addition to his writing career, Gbadamosi is active behind the scenes in the spheres of international literature and theatre. As a young man, he founded the Irish Irregulars Theatre Company and was literary director of London’s Siol Phádraig Irish Arts Festival. He has advised BBC Radio and the London International Festival of Theatre on African plays. A former director of the Society of Authors and of Wasafiri, he has served as a judge for literary prizes and a trustee of the Arcola Theatre.
Gbadamosi is a founding editor of the online literary platform WritersMosaic, a Royal Literary Fund initiative meant to showcase original writing from new and established UK writers of the global majority. He lives in London.
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More Gabriel Gbadamosi
Text: Read two poems by Gbadamosi at Voegelin View
Video: Gbadamosi discusses his Vauxhall walking tour as part of the 1000 Londoners project
Audio: Gbadamosi reads from his novel Vauxhall
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Photo by Matthew Thompson.