Bola Agbaje

Biography

Bola Agbaje is a British-Nigerian playwright and screenwriter born in 1981 in London. Raised in South London, she spent part of her early childhood in Nigeria before returning to the UK. Initially aspiring to be an actress, Agbaje shifted her focus to playwriting and joined the Royal Court Theatre's Young Writers Programme in 2007. Her debut play, Gone Too Far!, premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 2007 and won the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliated Theatre in 2008. The play was later adapted into a feature film released in 2013. Agbaje's subsequent works include Off the Endz (2010), Belong (2012), and The Burial (2013). Her writing often explores themes of identity, race, and the African diaspora. In 2018, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, one of 40 under the age of 40, as part of an initiative to address historical biases in the literary community.