Born December 10 1984, Cambridge University trained Helen Oyeyemi is a British novelist of Nigerian (Yoruba) origin. Publisher, Riverhead Books, (a Penguin imprint), provides the reader with a short, rounded biography: Oyeyemi is widely recognised as one of the most gifted and consistently surprising writers of her generation.” In "Boy, Snow, Bird", her fifth novel, Oyeyemi sustains her concern with ‘fluid identities and narrative layers.”. Compared with literary geniuses such as Rimbaud, Jeanette Winterson, Toni Morrison, her publisher argues that it would be “difficult to think of a writer more purely herself.”

Oyeyemi's awards include the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Somerset Maugham Award. In 2013 she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. To date she has written six novels: Mr. Fox, White is for Witching, The Opposite House, The Icarus Girl and most recently, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours.