Diran Adebayo
Oludiran "Diran" Adebayo FRSL (born 30 August 1968) is a British novelist, cultural critic and academic, best known for his tales of London and the lives of African diasporans. His work has been characterised by its interest in multiple cultural identities, subcultures, and its distinctive, "musical" use of language. His fans include the writer Zadie Smith, who has praised him for his "humanness", arguing that he is one of a few English writers who "trade in both knowledge and feeling". In 2002 The Times Literary Supplement named him as one of the Best Young British Novelists. Education and career Born Oludiran Adebayo in London in 1968, to Nigerian parents, Adebayo won a Major Scholarship when he was 12 to Malvern College, where he boarded as an adolescent, and is an Oxford University Law graduate. Among his friends at Wadham College, Oxford, were the writers Monica Ali and Hari Kunzru, while the Afro-Futurist critic and theorist Kodwo Eshun, whom Adebayo cites in his Acknowledgements to Some Kind of Black, was another university contemporary. Adebayo's debut novel, Some Kind of Black, centred on the youthful adventures of its protagonist, Dele, was one of the first to articulate a British-born African perspective, and