helen oyeyemi

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Features, Lit Scene, News September 18, 2017

Helen Oyeyemi Shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award

Helen Oyeyemi has been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Her story, “If a Book Is Locked There’s Probably a Good Reason for That, Don’t You Think?,” sees its protagonist arrive an office for work only to find “a mysterious locked diary.” Described by the judges as “brilliant,” her story is up against […]

On Helen Oyeyemi | An Essay

It was Helen Oyeyemi who first made me realize what I’d always found dissatisfying about short stories. A short story is not a story. A short story is an abridged novel. There is always a novel latent in every short story. And it prevents the short story from exhibiting what Oyeyemi calls “faith in storytelling.” A […]

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Features, Lit Scene March 13, 2017

Helen Oyeyemi, Angela Ajayi and Grace Oluseyi Win 2017 PEN America Awards

Some of the winners of the 2017 PEN America awards have been announced and, to our delight, they include Helen Oyeyemi, Angela Ajayi and Grace Oluseyi. Helen Oyeyemi’s collection of stories, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, won the $5,000 PEN Open Book Award, given “for an exceptional book-length work of literature by an […]

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Features, Lit Scene December 16, 2016

The Six African Authors on the 2017 PEN America Awards Longlist

PEN America has announced the longlist for its 2017 prizes, and there is a plethora of African authors named: from Teju Cole to Yaa Gyasi to Imbolo Mbue to Igoni A. Barrett to Petina Gappah to Helen Oyeyemi. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is longlisted for the $25,000 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, awarded “to […]

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Features, Lit Scene November 23, 2016

Do Judge These Books by Their Titles | By Tiwaladeoluwa Adekunle

ONE LITTLE READING pleasure of mine is the moment I finally know why a book is called what it is called, or the moment I find the title buried in one paragraph, smiling and winking up at me. We all love titles that work, and African writers do an especially good job coming up with these. In […]

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Features, Reviews July 27, 2016

The Magic of Childhood Captured in Six African Novels

Childhood is a stage in life that captivates us all, in part, because it is so elusive. Once we come of age, the experience of being a child—the innocence, bewilderment, and vulnerabilities—are immediately lost to an irrecoverable past. That’s why stories about children trying to make sense of a perplexing world have always been so powerful. […]

Aaron Bady Praises Helen Oyeyemi’s New Book for Being Twisted and Imperfect

It was published a couple of weeks ago, on March 8. The reviews are gushing in and— like Helen Oyeyemi’s five other books—What is Yours is Not Yours is raking up loads of stars from happy critics. The New York Times calls it “transcendent.” NPR says it’s “flawless.” Not surprising though. What is Yours is Not […]

Helen Oyeyemi Surprises Us With a New Book and the Ultimate Promo Photographs

Two years after Boy, Snow, Bird—one of the best novels of 2014—Oyeyemi surprises us with a collection of short stories titled What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. Oyeyemi is the queen of playfully experimental fiction, always taking risks with her work and pushing the boundaries on what it means to tell stories about Africa, blackness, and […]