Yulisa Pat Amadu Maddy

Yulisa Amadu Pat Maddy (27 December 1936 – 16 March 2014) was a Sierra Leonean writer, poet, actor, dancer, director and playwright. Known by his friends and colleagues as Pat Maddy or simply Prof, he had an "immense impact" on theatre in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Zambia.

Biography Maddy was born to Creole parents in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where he grew up and was educated (attending St. Edward's Secondary School) until the age of 22. In 1958, he travelled to France and then Britain. Maddy trained at the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama in the UK, and started broadcasting in Britain and Denmark, writing and producing radio plays.

He was Director of Drama at the Keskidee Centre in London, and led the short-lived Pan African Players, which in 1966 represented the United Kingdom, together with the Negro Theatre Workshop, at the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, performing Obi Egbuna's Wind versus Polygamy. Maddy's early plays, initially produced on the BBC African Service, were published as Obasai and Other Plays (1968). After a long period of illness, he died in March 2014, aged 78, at Choitram Hospital, Freetown.

Awards and honours Maddy received a Sierra Leone National Arts Festival Award in 1973, a Gulbenkian Grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 1978, and in 1979 an Edinburgh Festival Award.

He has also received the distinction of being commemorated in a special stained-glass window of the Pride Library in Canada, as one of 135 writers, including William Shakespeare, Federico García Lorca, W. H. Auden, James Baldwin and others, who have been acknowledged for their outstanding contribution to literature.

Works Alla Gbah [The Big Man], 1967 Yon Kon [Clever Thief], 1968. Reprinted in Cosmo Pieterse (ed.), Ten One-Act Plays, Heinemann, 1968. African Writers Series 34. Obasai [Over Yonder], 1971. Reprinted in Obasai and Other Plays, Heinemann, 1968. African Writers Series 89. Ghana Bendu [Tough Guy], 1971 Life Everlasting, 1972. Reprinted in Cosmo Pieterse (ed.), Short African Plays, Heinemann, 1972. African Writers Series 78. No Past, No Present, No Future (novel), London: Heinemann Educational, 1973. African Writers Series 137. If Wishes Were Horses (radio play), 1973 Big Breeze Blow, produced Freetown, 1974 Take Tem Draw Di Rope, Freetown, 1975 Naw We Yone Dehn See, 1975 Put for Me, produced Freetown, 1975 Big Berrin (Big Burying), Freetown, 1976 Saturday Night Out (television play), 1980 A Journey Into Christmas, 1980 Drums, Voices and Words, 1985 (with Donnarae MacCann) African Images in Juvenile Literature: Commentaries on Neocolonialist Fiction, Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1996 (with Donnarae MacCann) Neo-imperialism in Children's Literature about Africa: A Study of Contemporary Fiction, New York: Routledge, 2009.