Simi Bedford is a Nigerian novelist based in Britain. Her 1991 debut book Yoruba Girl Dancing, an autobiographical novel about a young Nigerian girl who is sent to England to receive a private school education, was well reviewed on publication and was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 abridgement.^[1] Her second novel, Not With Silver, was published in 2007.

Bedford was born in Lagos, Nigeria,^[2] to parents who had come there from Sierra Leone.^[3] Her great-grandparents were from Nigeria and were rescued from a slave ship.^[4] Bedford spent her early years in Lagos, before being sent for her education to Britain,^[5] where she attended boarding-school from the age of six.^[6]

She read Law at Durham University, and subsequently worked in the media, including as a radio presenter and a television researcher.^[6] Living in London, she married and raised three children.^[5] She is now divorced from her artist husband, Martin Bedford, but they still maintain a friendly relationship, even sharing space together in a house in Devon.^[7]

Bedford's debut novel Yoruba Girl Dancing is semi-autobiographical, recounting the experience of a Nigerian girl's education in Britain,^[8] which Francine Prose described in a Washington Post review as: "[b]eautifully written ... at once acerbic and moving, painfully honest about the cost of emigration and adjustment."^[9] A five-part abridgement of Yoruba Girl Dancing (by Margaret Busby, read by Adjoa Andoh and produced by David Hunter) was broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime in October 1991.^[10] The novel is extracted in Busby's 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa.^[11][12]

Bedford's second novel, Not With Silver (2007), is historical fiction, focusing on mid-18th-century West Africa, slavery and court intrigue.^[13] Drawing on its author's own ancestral history, Not With Silver is unique among books about slavery in depicting the lives of people in Africa before they were enslaved.^[4] The Spectator's reviewer concluded: "This relentlessly honest book has no false or sentimental notes, absolutely no prettifying. A black warrior facing unexpected danger is taught to imagine the worst, 'look the leopard in the eye.' Simi Bedford does just that. A brave and uncomfortable labour of love."^[14]

• Yoruba Girl Dancing, London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1991, ISBN 978-0434055579; Mandarin, 1991, ISBN 978-0749310103.
• Not with Silver, London: Chatto & Windus, 2007, ISBN 978-1856192354; Vintage (paperback), 2008, ISBN 978-0099445173.

• Radio interview from 2007.