Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Olajumoke Oyeyemi (born 1984) is a British novelist and writer of short stories. Since 2014 her home has been in Prague.

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 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 2011, and a fifth, Boy, Snow, Bird, in 2014.

Oyeyemi published a story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, in 2016.

Oyeyemi's latest work, a novel titled Gingerbread, was published in 2019.