The British-American novelist, playwright and commentator Bonnie Greer has died aged 77.
In a statement, her husband David Hutchins said that she died on Tuesday evening following a brief illness.
Greer’s “intelligence, courage and distinctive voice made an enduring contribution to British cultural and public life”, said Hutchins. “To me, she was my partner, confidante and inspiration, and I feel profoundly privileged to have shared my life with her.”
“RIP Bonnie Greer,” wrote novelist Bernardine Evaristo in a social media post. “Very sad news. There was a period in the 90s/00s when Bonnie was probably the most important and high profile black cultural commentator in the UK. Other than her writing, she also sat on many important boards – representing.”
In an Instagram post, former deputy prime minister David Lammy wrote that Greer was “a powerful wordsmith and artist, she was eloquent and exacting. A true life force.”
Greer was born on 16 November 1948, the eldest of seven children, and grew up on Chicago’s South Side. She studied playwriting under David Mamet in the city before moving to New York to work in theatre. In 1985, she brought a play to the Edinburgh fringe, and ultimately moved to the UK the following year, becoming a citizen in 1997.
Greer’s work – which often focused on the lives of minorities, and of women – spanned novels, nonfiction, plays and broadcasting.
Her first book, Hanging By Her Teeth, published in 1994, was a novel about a Black American woman travelling through the US and Europe in search of her father. Her later books included Obama Music (2009), about her and the former US president’s connections to Chicago’s South Side, Langston Hughes: The Value of Contradiction (2011), a biography of the Harlem Renaissance figure, and A Parallel Life (2014), her memoir. In 2019, she contributed to New Daughters of Africa, a landmark anthology edited by Margaret Busby. In 2022, she was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Greer’s stage plays included Dancing on Blackwater, which explored mother-daughter relationships, Jitterbug, composed of seven short plays about cultural divisions, and Munda Negra, for which she won the Soho Theatre Company Verity Bargate award for best play.
In 2005, the BBC broadcast Marilyn and Ella Backstage at the Mocambo, Greer’s radio play about Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald – in the 50s, Monroe persuaded a nightclub to book Fitzgerald amid racist reluctance, promising to sit in the front row every night. Greer eventually adapted the story into a musical drama for stage, titled Marilyn and Ella. The drama ran at the Edinburgh Fringe, the Theatre Royal Stratford East, and the Apollo Theatre, London.
Greer wrote many radio dramas for the BBC, including Rosa Parks, about the civil rights icon, and Ferguson, inspired by August Strindberg’s play The Father and set in the US in 2016, against the backdrop of protests following the police killing of Michael Brown. She also translated and dramatised The Little Prince for a full-cast BBC radio adaptation.
She often wrote opinion pieces for publications including the Guardian, the Independent and the New Statesman.
In an interview with the Guardian in 2016, she said that “Black Lives Matter is a rerun. It’s a replay of what we did as student activists in the 60s, the Black Panthers. I understand it because I’ve been through it and seen it.”
Greer regularly appeared as a panellist on current affairs shows, including Newsnight Review and Question Time. Appearing in a controversial episode of the latter alongside far-right British National Party leader Nick Griffin in 2009, she heard “something in the audience: a kind of singing”, she later wrote in the Guardian, and turned the experience into an opera, Yes, which opened two years later. She served on the boards of the Royal Opera House, the British Museum and the London Film School, and was chancellor of Kingston University, London. In the 2010 birthday honours, she was appointed OBE for contribution to the arts.
In 2009, she wrote that her hero was James Baldwin, describing him as “the person who first moved me and still does”. She was 12 when she read his first book, Go Tell It on the Mountain. “He nailed the emotions I felt right on the head and I read all his subsequent books.”
Greer married Hutchins, whom she had first met in the aisle of a supermarket, in 1993. In his statement after her death, Hutchins said that “those closest to Bonnie will remember her warmth, humour, generosity and extraordinary ability to bring people together”.
Many writers and politicians shared tributes to Greer on social media on Wednesday. “Bonnie’s voice brought courage, humour and humanity to Britain’s cultural conversation”, wrote London mayor Sadiq Khan. “She inspired and opened doors for so many others. And she was great fun too.”
