In October 2009, Bonnie Greer sat on a BBC Question Time panel beside British National Party leader Nick Griffin, an appearance she later called "probably the weirdest and most creepy experience" of her life. Greer, the Chicago-born playwright, novelist and broadcaster who became one of the most distinctive voices in British cultural life, died on September 16, 2026, at 77. She turned that night into Yes, an opera written with composer Errollyn Wallen that premiered at the Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio in November 2011; the original broadcast, watched by nearly eight million people, according to Classical Music Magazine, drew hundreds of protesters to BBC Television Centre, where six people were arrested after some breached police lines, according to NBC News.

Her husband, David Hutchins, announced her death, saying Greer was "an acclaimed playwright, author, critic, cultural and political commentator whose intelligence, courage and distinctive voice made an enduring contribution to British cultural and public life," according to the Irish Examiner.

Greer was born on November 16, 1948, the eldest of seven children in a working poor family on Chicago's South Side. She grew up in a segregated neighborhood there through the 1950s and 1960s. Her father worked in a factory after serving in the Second World War, and the family, though poor, owned its home and sent the children to Catholic school, according to a Kirkus Reviews account of her memoir A Parallel Life. She initially set her sights on a legal career, dropping it after a professor told her he did not think women belonged in the profession, and turned to theatre instead, studying under David Mamet in Chicago and training at the Actors Studio in New York under Elia Kazan.

After years living in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, she moved to Britain in 1986 by way of the Edinburgh Festival and became a British citizen in 1997. She worked as an Arts Council playwright in residence at London's Soho Theatre and the Black Theatre Co-operative, and her 1993 play Munda Negra, which addressed the mental health of Black women, won the Verity Bargate Award for best new play. Her musical Marilyn and Ella, built around the true story of Marilyn Monroe helping get Ella Fitzgerald booked into a nightclub, moved from a BBC radio play through the Edinburgh Fringe to the West End. In 2016 her play The Hotel Cerise, a reimagining of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard relocated to a fading Black-owned Michigan hotel during that year's US presidential election, opened at Stratford East's Theatre Royal, according to Time Out London. She also wrote and presented Reflecting Skin, a BBC documentary tracing the presence of Black people in Western European art, and contributed cultural and political essays to the New Statesman on subjects ranging from civil rights history to representation on screen, according to the outlet's own New Statesman archive of her work.

Greer's forthright presence made her a regular panellist on BBC Two's Newsnight Review and BBC One's Question Time, roles that carried her into public institutions as well as public argument. She joined the British Museum's board of trustees in 2005 and became its deputy chair in 2009, also serving on the boards of the Royal Opera House and the London Film School and, from 2011 to 2015, as President of the Bronte Society. She was appointed OBE in the 2010 Birthday Honours for services to the arts.

In 2013 she was installed as Chancellor of Kingston University, succeeding Sir Peter Hall. Taking up the role, she described her ambition to champion entrepreneurship among students, telling the Times Higher Education, "Unless we keep that spirit going, we won't be able to compete in the world, because government is shrinking." She published the novels Hanging by Her Teeth and Entropy, the nonfiction book Obama Music, a biography of Langston Hughes, and in 2014 the memoir A Parallel Life, which traced her path from Chicago through her thirtieth-year move to New York. In 2022 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Greer married David Hutchins in 1993. He said those closest to her would remember her "warmth, humour, generosity and extraordinary ability to bring people together," adding, "To me, she was my partner, confidante and inspiration, and I feel profoundly privileged to have shared my life with her."

What persists is the body of work that carried a Chicago factory worker's daughter into the boardrooms of the British Museum and the Royal Opera House without ever losing the argumentative, questioning voice that got her there: the plays and novels, the opera built from a single unsettling television appearance, the students who graduated under her chancellorship at Kingston, the essays that argued for a wider view of whose history counts, and a shelf of books, from Hanging by Her Teeth to A Parallel Life, that trace one life across two countries and five decades of change.