Helen Oyeyemi

Brenda Cooper (University of Cape Town)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Kerry Myler (Newman University), 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 raised in England, to which her Nigerian parents migrated when she was four. This makes her part of the so-called new Diaspora – those many families from Africa, and other former colonies, who share the global mobility of the late twentieth and twenty first centuries and have relocated to Europe and North America. She has published two novels, The Icarus Girl (2005) and The Opposite House (2007), the first when she was only twenty. She has also published a volume of two plays under the title Juniper’s Whitening (2006). She suffered from depression at school and has been described as “the Nigerian-born girl from the South London council estate who turned to h…

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2296 words

Citation: Cooper, Brenda. "Helen Oyeyemi". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 October 2008 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5883, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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