Helen Oyeyemi

Brenda Cooper (University of Cape Town); Revised By: Leila Kamali (Independent Scholar - Europe)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Gina Lyle (University of York), Graham MacPhee (University of Manchester), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Andrew Radford (University of Glasgow), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

Born 10 Dec 1984
Activity 2005-ongoing

Places

Born in Nigeria
Active in United Kingdom

Activities

Primary

Children's/Young Adult writer
Novelist

Resources

Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and migrated to England with her parents at the age of four. She grew up in Lewisham, south London, wrote her first novel The Icarus Girl (2005) while in sixth form at Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in Holland Park, and had it published at the age of 20 while an undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Oyeyemi has since published a volume of two plays, “Victimese” and “Juniper’s Whitening” (2006), and six further novels, including The Opposite House (2007), White is for Witching (2009), Mr Fox (2011), Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), Gingerbread (2019), and Peaces (2021). The short-story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours appeared in 2016. Oyeyemi’s work, broadly speaking, explores phenomena of cultural and gendered dislocation, and situates its questioning approach in a...

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4019 words

Citation: Cooper, Brenda, Leila Kamali. "Helen Oyeyemi". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 October 2008; last revised 16 November 2023. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5883, accessed 10 June 2026.]