The Culture Pages – The Queen of Fractured Fairy Tales

Hlen Oyeyemi writes magical, unsettling novels in which nothing remains fixed. She has lived her life that way, too.

- By Helen Shaw. Photograph by Adama Jalloh

The first story the world told about Helen Oyeyemi was that she was a prodigy. A South London girl who had emigrated from Nigeria at the age of 4, she was inward-keeping, sometimes bullied, often desperately sad. As a teen, she endured bouts of clinical depression that she countered with books from the library, episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and, eventually, writing. When she was about 15, she read a perfect book. “I stayed home from school,” she told me. “I was ‘off sick’ for three days in bed reading Ali Smith’s Hotel World and just being like, This is allowed? I can’t believe this. I immediately wanted to try it.” Reading was an intense, isolated, even isolating experience. “That’s what made it feel like it was my lifeblood or my own heartbeat,” she said. “It just couldn’t be discussed.”

She wrote short stories throughout her adolescence and sent her strongest one to an agent, looking for advice. He called her the next day. In about six months, at age 18, Oyeyemi wrote The Icarus Girl, an accomplished novel about an 8-year-old whose paranormal not-quite twin from Nigeria starts to wreak havoc. She signed her book contract on the day she got her A-level exam results; the book was published in 2005, while she was taking a politicalscience degree at Cambridge. Reviews were strong, though most of them seemed aware of her youth and the story of her discovery. “Deserving of all its praise, this is a masterly first novel,” wrote Lesley Downer in the New York