Helen Oyeyemi Novelist
Helen Olajumoke Oyeyemi (born 10 December 1984) is a British novelist and
writer of short stories. Since 2014 her home has been in Prague.
Life and Writings
Oyeyemi wrote her first
novel, The Icarus Girl, while studying for her A-levels at Cardinal
Vaughan Memorial School. While studying social and political
sciences at Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge University,
Oyeyemi saw two of her plays, Juniper's Whitening and Victimese,
performed by fellow students to critical acclaim, and subsequently published
by Methuen.
In 2007 Bloomsbury published
Oyeyemi's second novel, The Opposite House,
which is inspired by Cuban mythology.Her third novel, White is for
Witching, described as having "roots in Henry James and Edgar Allan
Poe", was published by Picador in May 2009. A fourth
novel, Mr Fox ("a meditation on the writing process
itself, filled with vignettes about how language may ensnare or liberate",
wrote Anita Sethi), was published by Picador in June 2011, and a
fifth, Boy, Snow, Bird, in 2014.
Oyeyemi's latest book, the story collection What Is Not
Yours Is Not Yours, was released in 2016.
Professional awards and recognition
Her novel White Is For
Witching was a 2009 Shirley Jackson Award finalist
and won a 2010 Somerset Maugham
Award. In 2009 Oyeyemi was recognized as one of the women on Venus Zine's "25 under 25"
list. In 2013 she was included in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists
list. Boy, Snow, Bird was a finalist for the Los Angeles
Times Book Prize in 2014. What Is Not Yours Is Not
Yours won the PEN Open Book Award:
for an exceptional book-length work of literature by an author of color
published in 2016.
Oyeyemi was a judge on the Booktrust Independent
Foreign Fiction Prize for 2015,and served as a judge for the
2015 Scotiabank Giller
Prize.
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