Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Oyeyemi is a British novelist and playwright, born in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1984 and raised in London from early childhood. She wrote her first novel, The Icarus Girl, while still studying for her A-levels, and went on to read social and political sciences at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Her fiction reworks fairy tale, folklore, and the Gothic into unsettling, often playful examinations of identity and possession, in books including White Is for Witching, Mr. Fox, Boy, Snow, Bird, and Gingerbread. She won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2010 and the PEN Open Book Award in 2016, was named to Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2013, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2012. She has lived in Prague since 2013.