Ade Solanke

Adeola "Ade" Solanke is an award-winning British-Nigerian playwright and screenwriter. She is best known for her debut stage play, Pandora's Box, which was produced at the Arcola Theatre in 2012, and was nominated as Best New Play in the Off West End Theatre Awards. Her other writing credits include the award-winning BBC Radio drama series Westway and the Nigerian feature film Dazzling Mirage (2014). She is the founder and creative director of the company Spora Stories, whose aim is to "create original drama for stage and screen, telling the dynamic stories of the African diaspora." Solanke has previously worked as an arts journalist and in radio and television, and in 1988 set up Tama Communications, offering a writing and publicity service, whose clients included the BBC, the Arts Council and the Midland Bank.

Of Nigerian heritage, Adeola Solanke was born in London, growing up in Ladbroke Grove in the west of the capital. She earned an MFA in Screenwriting from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, where she was a Fulbright Scholar and Phi Beta Kappa international scholar. She also has a postgraduate diploma in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an honours degree in English Literature from the University of Sheffield.

She worked as a story analyst for several Hollywood companies, including Sundance, New Line and Disney. Her first screenplay, Femi’s Thirtieth, was a semifinalist in the annual Nicholl screenwriting contest in Los Angeles. For some years she worked as an arts journalist, writing for publications including The Times Literary Supplement, The Voice, The Guardian, the New Statesman and West Africa Magazine. In 1988 she set up Tama Communications, a writing, research and publicity service "sympathetic to the needs of the voluntary sector and black organisations", that was judged an "outstanding enterprise" in the 1989 London Livewire competition to find the best young business brains. She has also taught at several universities, among them Goldsmiths, University of London, and Pan-African University, Lagos, Nigeria, as well as at such institutions as London's City Lit and in Zimbabwe at the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich.

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