Helen Oyeyemi: a reading and conversation

We welcome all to join us in the library March 19th at 18:00 for a special event with celebrated author Helen Oyeyemi, who returns to AAU for a reading and conversation on the writing process and her most recent novel A New New Me (2025).

Helen Oyeyemi (*1984) is one of the most respected contemporary British novelists, known for blending folklore, myth, and fairy-tale traditions with modern psychological and literary fiction. She wrote her debut novel, The Icarus Girl (2005), while still in high school. While studying sociology and political science at University of Cambridge, she also began writing plays, before ultimately focusing on prose fiction. Her second novel, The Opposite House (2007), draws heavily on Cuban mythology, while White Is for Witching (2009), a gothic narrative influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, won the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award.
This was followed by Mr. Fox (2011). In 2012, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2013 she was named to Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists list. Her later works include Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), the short-story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (2016), which won the PEN Open Book Award, and the novels Gingerbread (2019) and Peaces (2021).

Published in February 2024, her eighth novel Parasol Against the Axe is her first to be set in the Czech Republic, where she has lived for more than a decade. Her most recent book, A New New Me (2025), also takes place there, reflecting her ongoing engagement with the country’s culture, language, and literary landscape.