Misan Sagay

Misan Sagay
Occupation	Screenwriter
Years active	1999–present

Misan Sagay is a British-Nigerian screenwriter, best known for the 2013 film Belle.

Sagay graduated from St Andrews University with a First Class Honours degree in biochemistry then trained as a doctor at St Mary's Hospital Medical School, London.

After qualifying as a doctor, she specialised in Paediatric Hamematology and Critical Care and at the Bone Marrow Transplant Unit at Westminster Children's Hospital.

A former emergency room doctor, Sagay made her writing debut with the 1999 film The Secret Laughter of Women on which she was a writer and producer. She co-wrote the teleplay for the Oprah-produced television movie Their Eyes Were Watching God, based on the book by the same name.

Sagay wrote the 2013 British drama Belle after visiting Scone Palace, where she saw a unique portraiture of two women, Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray. This painting, and the women within, acted as the inspiration for her screenplay. The film tells the Story of Belle, the daughter of an enslaved African and a British admiral. The film discusses the prominence of African decedents and women in British society in the late 1700s. In 2013, the authorship of the film was in dispute. The director of the film, Amma Asante, contested that she dismissed Sagay's writing and instead wrote her own adaptation of the story seeking writing credit. Asante's claim caused the Writers Guild of America to automatically investigate per their regulations. The guild took the case through arbitration and ruled in favour of Sagay as the sole writer. Asante appealed but lost.

As of July 2016, Sagay is working as a co-writer on the six-part limited TV series Guerrilla from award winning writer and producer John Ridley, known as the screenwriter of 12 years A Slave. The Showtime and Sky Atlantic series stars award winning actor Idris Elba, known for the TV series Luther.

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